Mike Diana was the first artist in the United States convicted for artistic obscenity. His crime, for which he was convicted in 1994, was creating and distributing a zine titled Boiled Angel. Diana's work and subsequent conviction opens potential avenues of exploration into radical rhetorics, ethics, and perceptions of aberrance. This paper considers how endeavors labelled as aberrant or radical ask us to expand ethical boundaries, even leading us to question what we might consider "technical," "professional," or "valuable." This reconsideration of appropriateness and acceptability through extremism, which leads us through the often-fuzzy distinction between "morals" and "ethics," has the potential to open or amplify opportunities for underrepresented or marginalized authors, groups, and genres by forcing us to question why we draw the lines we draw with what we deem as socially, professionally, or morally acceptable.

This research used a participant observer method to describe and analyze the digital literacy practices of one grassroots community group that organized around the issue of municipal city council redistricting. The group proposed and advocated for city council district lines that reflected the minority-majority makeup of the city's population. The group effectively crafted different genres, including informational Google Docs, maps, form letters, petitions, social media graphics, press releases, and public speeches to advocate for their position. This research argues for the study of activists' digital literacy practices and the role of digital technology in activist efforts.

This research used a participant observer method to describe and analyze the digital literacy practices of one grassroots community group that organized around the issue of municipal city council redistricting. The group proposed and advocated for city council district lines that reflected the minority-majority makeup of the city's population. The group effectively crafted different genres, including informational Google Docs, maps, form letters, petitions, social media graphics, press releases, and public speeches to advocate for their position. This research argues for the study of activists' digital literacy practices and the role of digital technology in activist efforts.

In this article, we uptake the call for equipping researchers in practicing socially just CER in Indigenous communities through developing a framework for cultural humility in CER. Sparked by our research team's experience considering the potential of CER to transform and contribute to the needs of both tribal and academic communities, we present cultural humility as a personal precondition for socially just, decolonial CER practice. We use the Inuit cultural practice of nalukataq as a key metaphor to present our framework for cultural humility: listening to the caller, setting your feet, pulling equally, staying in sync.

This introductory dialogue invites readers to think with a range of scholars about the role of community engaged researchers in the field. It draws together a range of perspectives as way of honoring CER through both methodology and genre. The authors provide insight into their own experiences and draw attention to elements of CER that rarely get discussed and published.

Drawing on qualitative data collected from program participants in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), I show how federal government assistance information infrastructure often does not remediate, and instead exacerbates, existent inequalities. I use the example of WIC's Approved Product List (APL) to show how the APL, as a genre that's part of WIC's information infrastructure, contributes to a hyper-standardized benefit redemption process that increases visibility and vulnerability for program participants. This article argues that increased attention to the genres that make up information infrastructures may help to better locate sites of inequity like the APL, and better understand how systemic/structural problems perpetuate infrastructurally.

Historically, the field of technical and professional communication (TPC) has seen its ethical responsibility in a rather narrow way: TPC has been thought to be related only to precisely and correctly transmitting information, and TPC's ethical responsibilities are more related to either technology creators or users, but less so to technical communicators (Dombrowski, 2000). However, in recent years, with the rapid development and application of science and technology, scientific discourse and technical communication have made greater impacts on society and people's lives than ever before. Our discpline has increasingly realized the "complex, active, and creative" (Dombrowski, 2000, p. 3) roles technical communicators can play. Under the influence of modern theorists (Weaver, Burke, Foucault, etc.), we start to think of science itself as a value and ethical system that involves goals, ethical procedures, and decision making, and more importantly, we realize the power of the language we use for scientific and technical communication. Our ethical decisions relating to the genre, language style, layout design, and inclusion/exclusion of certain information influences readers' perceptions of the fact, shaping their knowledges, values, and beliefs of the world. As Dombrowski (2000) puts it: "as our influecne grows, so do our responsiblities" (p. 3). Now it is the right time for technical communicators to realize our expanded roles and responsiblities in doing our work and to embrace the ethical and social justice turn in our field.

As part of a larger research project on the rhetoric of sexual violence prevention in online university courses, the researcher conducted rhetorical analyses of two prevention courses from the United States and New Zealand. This study analyzed the rhetorical strategies used in two courses with attention to five subcategories: content genres, ways the content addresses the audience, messaging strategies, levels of prevention, and sentence-level choices. From the analyses, the researcher recommends rhetorical considerations for prevention courses. While the New Zealand course had more effective language choices, the US course had a better overall narrative structure.

As technical genres continue to grow and morph in promising new directions, we attempt an analysis of what are typically viewed as mundane genres. We use the term gray genres, which we find useful for interrogating texts that tend to fall in categories that tend toward a blandness that is invariably difficult to quantify. We use hedonism, along with a historical accounting for this value from its classical rhetorical lineage and run it up to contemporary applications. We posit that playful stylistic choices---while typically discouraged in more technical spaces---actually improves the rhetorical canon of delivery for informative documents. We close with case studies that offer close readings of a few attempts at employing hedonistic tactics within typical gray genres.

Changes in technology, development philosophy, and scale have required game designers to change how they communicate and mediate design decisions. Traditional game design studios used an extensive game design document (GDD), a meta-genre that described most of the game before it was developed. Current studies suggest that this is no longer the case. We conducted interviews at four independent game studios in order to share their game design documentation processes, revealing that, while an exhaustive GDD is rare, the meta-genre functions are preserved in a variety of mediated ways.

Risk associated with a Pacific Northwest earthquake was expressed through a moderately successful social media risk communication campaign known as #14gallons. #14gallons encouraged people to collect and store 14 gallons of fresh water per person and take a selfie with their water, tagging others to do the same. This article frames the hashtag campaign within scholarship on the rhetoric of risk, defines the genre of the "risk selfie," and then uses a modified version of Laurie Gries's iconographic tracking method to produce information about the campaign that can be productively employed by risk communication practitioners.

As the healthcare system in the United States becomes more complex, so does the information needed for administrators and clinicians to keep apprised of new regulatory and systemic changes. In this article, I use a review and analysis of an online resource project to identify effective practices to educate and support healthcare safety net organizations, or those clinics that serve low-income populations. The project team consisted primarily of healthcare researchers who used a systematic review of the scholarly literature to develop online systems for transmitting information about healthcare payment and service delivery reform to those serving low income populations. As the technical communicator working on this project, the author advocated incorporating concepts of user research and user-centered design to the project team. This research included a survey of provider-users. The analysis of this project revealed that, in the health and medical community, evidence-based medicine and the genre of systematic literature review may be privileged such that provider-user needs for information seeking are not taken into account when designing online communication based on these reviews. Communication designers may need to work with and adapt the work of translation science and knowledge-to-action to develop more user-centered online content for provider education.

Technical support, a traditional practice of technical communication, is rapidly changing due to the ubiquitous use of digital technologies (Spinuzzi, 2007). In fact, many technology companies now have dedicated Twitter accounts specifically for providing technical support to end users. In response to this changing technical support landscape, we conducted an empirical study of Twitter-based interactions among six companies and their customers in order to examine the nature of the emerging technical support genre on Twitter. Among other findings, we discovered technical support was widely sought among the customers of the companies studied (Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, Samsung, Hewlett Packard, and Dell) with nearly 200,000 tweets recorded in just a 38-day timespan. We also found a majority of individuals used Twitter to complain about a brand as opposed to seeking support for a specific technical problem. In our entry, we discuss the implications of these and other findings for technical communication practitioners and researchers who design for technical documentation in social media contexts.

This study examines an ethnographically-collected set of social media posts from 5 applications in order to understand the rhetorical functions of something we call "metacommunicative" hashtags (e.g., #PackersGottaWinThisOne, #thisweddingisawesome). Through a process of inductive analysis, we identified recurring genre functions that are both context-specific to applications' ecologies and, at the same time, "stabilized enough" (Schryer, 1993, p. 204) to warrant the use of rhetorical genre theory as a tool for understanding their communicative purposes

Written communication and its accumulated principles of applied design often serve conservative and preservationist goals. Literacy and its various, sprawling technological apparatuses of production and distribution preserve ideas and prepare them for uptake and adaptation. What is preserved in writing speaks with greater reliability over time and choices about design can influence the validity or appropriateness of those texts, by invoking proper voices and suggesting or demanding appropriate relationships between people and institutions organized around those texts. While this may seem an inhospitable way to open a column in a journal on communication design, my point is not intentionally disparaging. Instead it is to draw a contrast between types of communication design work: that which works to affiliate discourse with a location and practices of uptake and that which creates and works across those locations.

As Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) utilized in workplaces, classrooms, and community organizations continue to proliferate, it follows that the kinds of knowledge necessary to assemble those technologies in order to engage in effective professional communication are becoming increasingly complex. This article details a study conducted of two student teams engaged in a service-learning class in which they were tasked with producing high-quality digital products---a mini-documentary and a simple, but interactive website---for client organizations---an art classroom in a local public school and a mentoring initiative within a local non-profit. The main findings of this study are that students mobilized a variety of resources and created a flexible network of technologies, knowledges, people, and modes of communication in order to address issues pertinent to their clients. In addition, I argue that the most important resource students mobilized was knowledge itself, indicating that one of the most important aspects of digital composing may be in-depth, practical knowledge of technologies, modes, and the genres they involve. Ultimately, the implications of this limited, classroom-based case study are that a situated understanding of how to assemble knowledges for the effective design of communication within a given communication infrastructure may be more important than access to the most cutting-edge modes and technologies, especially when working with resource-poor organizational clients.

What is communication design? The term may represent, along with technical communication, information design, and content development, the latest permutation of how the work once known as technical writing has been re-named and re-professionalized. This is a reductive answer, of course, since the terms emphasize different qualities of that work and all are pinchy and baggy as generic descriptors. A different answer is that the term communication design captures an awareness that our field lacks a center. It has its genres and its processes, but as Johnson-Eilola and Selber (in press) argue, it is the focus on defining and solving problems in novel ways and in response to the exigencies of highly varied situations that underscores the importance of what we do. I prefer to see communication design as an embrace of that role, a recognition that the scope of our concern is broad: it is communication. It is also constructive work, aimed at producing concrete effects in the world. It is not just writing; it is design.