At a moment when questions of equity and access are reshaping higher education and professional practice, technical and professional communication (TPC) is undergoing a "social justice turn" that centers ethics, equity, and care within its research and design practices. Designing for Social Justice: Community-Engaged Approaches in Technical and Professional Communication (edited by Jialei Jiang and Jason C. K. Tham, 2025) situates itself squarely within this movement, framing justice not as an optional theme but as a guiding principle for communication design. Jiang and Tham note that this collection "explore[s] the intersection of multimodal design and community engagement for social justice" (p. 3), and they introduce design advocacy to capture this orientation.

Have you ever wondered how design matters other than in content, structure, and insightful arrangement? Amy Gore's latest text, Book Anatomy: Body Politics and the Materiality of Indigenous Book History, can provide some answers to this question. A single sentence from the concluding chapter in her book--- "When we read a book for its narrative content only, we miss half the story" (p.125)---speaks volumes about where lies the book's alternative rhetorical possibility. This alternative rhetoricity rests on paratextuality manifesting a text's layout, cover design, and spatial texture that make up the cornerstone of design-based communicative practices.

Citation injustices have a long history in scholarly writing and have led to underrepresentation and silenced voices of certain author groups (e.g., women and people of color). Concerns about whose voices are cited, heard, and privileged have encouraged interventions for Technical and Professional Communication (TPC) scholars to promote inclusivity and equity in scholarly writing and the design of communication. This article examines another aspect on citation injustices tied to publishing policies and style-guide conventions and conformity: practices for crediting shared first authors and equally contributing authors for their scholarship. We question current citation practices and examine style-guide rules and conventions of 115 TPC and communication-related journals to identify where citation injustices may occur in scenarios with shared first authors and equally contributing authors. We argue that TPC scholars should pushback against style-guide conformity in their publications and citations to embrace more equitable and socially just practices. We conclude by presenting five opportunities for TPC and communication scholars to change current citation practices in our field.

Embodied Environmental Risk in Technical Communication , edited by Samuel Stinson and Mary Le Rouge, is a timely collection of essays addressing the ways that humans conceptualize and interact with their environment when attempting to communicate the dangers of crises---such as climate change and COVID-19. Explicitly responding to the work of Jeffrey Grabill and Michelle Simmons (e.g., in their seminal 1998 essay, "Toward a Critical Rhetoric of Risk Communication"), this collection offers a broad variety of lenses for thinking about humans' relationships to their surroundings, especially while communicating environmental risk. The 14 chapters in this volume apply methodologies including rhetorical and discourse analysis, ethnography, integrated risk communication, and antiracist framing to topics ranging from university communications about the pandemic to groundwater pollution to upcycled art installations, in the process complicating traditional understandings of risk as something that exists "'out there,' independent of our minds and cultures, waiting to be measured" (Slovic, 1999, p. 690). Considered broadly, the collection offers human bodies and ecological impact as more effective barometers for risk than abstract calculations; individual chapters offer heuristics grounded in human experience or environmental considerations, along with discussion questions and assignments for use in classroom settings. The diversity of topics and methodologies represented ensure that the collection offers something of interest to most scholars and practitioners of risk communication, environmental communication, or embodiment in technical communication.

This article forwards a document analysis of the University Press of Colorado's publicly available academic and scholarly publishing policies and procedure materials. This analysis utilizes the online heuristic "Anti-Racist Scholarly Reviewing Practices: A Heuristic for Editors, Reviewers, and Authors," (ARRH) and a framework developed by the author that works to pinpoint places within publishing policy and process documents that may allow for discriminatory and oppressive practice. To conclude, this article forwards tangible changes to academic publishing process documents to ensure that inclusion remains an important consideration in the drafting of publishing policy and guideline documents.

In Salt of the earth: Rhetoric, preservation, and white supremacy , James Chase Sanchez examined rhetorical processes that sustain white supremacy: identity construction, storytelling, and silencing. This cultural rhetorics project used narrative inquiry, autoethnography, and constellation to explore "hegemonic storytelling" (p. 47--48). Sanchez centered narratives about growing up "Brown" (p. 10) in Grand Saline, Texas and returning to his hometown years later to create a documentary film, Man on Fire , about minister Charles Moore's self-immolation in a local parking lot. Ultimately, Sanchez argued that a deeper understanding of oppressive rhetorics is useful for rhetorical scholars, communications practitioners, and storytellers of all types (historians, journalists, filmmakers, archivists, etc.). He guided rhetoric and communications design towards more thoughtful consideration of embedded communicative norms and the harmful practices they conceal.

This article discusses a newly created method of UX journey mapping---User Experience as Racial Storytelling (UXRS)---designed to centralize Black user narratives in design thinking, and the teaching implications as a Black woman non-tenure track (NTT) online technical and professional communication (TPC) instructor. Revisiting an assigned group activity in a synchronous online technical writing course for engineers at a Predominantly White Institution (PWI), this essay will share pedagogical approaches of user experience as TPC pedagogy used to scaffold this method of racial storytelling as an anti-racist practice to adapt a social justice framework. This essay suggests UXRS can aid engineering students' perspective of inclusive design.

This article explores the challenge of implementing diversity, equity, and inclusion literacies in popular buyer persona platforms such as HubSpot and FlowMapp. Drawing on a practitioner interview with a public relations and marketing director, Dr. Danielle Feldman Karr, this article contextualizes Feldman Karr's efforts to revise her design team's internal buyer persona construction process to better engage DEI issues. This article considers the successes and challenges of applying an ethics of care informed by Graham's Black feminist ethics in order to analyze how designers think about "the good life" (flourishing) in persona redesign.

This article explores the challenge of implementing diversity, equity, and inclusion literacies in popular buyer persona platforms such as HubSpot and FlowMapp. Drawing on a practitioner interview with a public relations and marketing director, Dr. Danielle Feldman Karr, this article contextualizes Feldman Karr's efforts to revise her design team's internal buyer persona construction process to better engage DEI issues. This article considers the successes and challenges of applying an ethics of care informed by Graham's Black feminist ethics in order to analyze how designers think about "the good life" (flourishing) in persona redesign.

In Salt of the earth: Rhetoric, preservation, and white supremacy , James Chase Sanchez examined rhetorical processes that sustain white supremacy: identity construction, storytelling, and silencing. This cultural rhetorics project used narrative inquiry, autoethnography, and constellation to explore "hegemonic storytelling" (p. 47--48). Sanchez centered narratives about growing up "Brown" (p. 10) in Grand Saline, Texas and returning to his hometown years later to create a documentary film, Man on Fire , about minister Charles Moore's self-immolation in a local parking lot. Ultimately, Sanchez argued that a deeper understanding of oppressive rhetorics is useful for rhetorical scholars, communications practitioners, and storytellers of all types (historians, journalists, filmmakers, archivists, etc.). He guided rhetoric and communications design towards more thoughtful consideration of embedded communicative norms and the harmful practices they conceal.

Embodied Environmental Risk in Technical Communication , edited by Samuel Stinson and Mary Le Rouge, is a timely collection of essays addressing the ways that humans conceptualize and interact with their environment when attempting to communicate the dangers of crises---such as climate change and COVID-19. Explicitly responding to the work of Jeffrey Grabill and Michelle Simmons (e.g., in their seminal 1998 essay, "Toward a Critical Rhetoric of Risk Communication"), this collection offers a broad variety of lenses for thinking about humans' relationships to their surroundings, especially while communicating environmental risk. The 14 chapters in this volume apply methodologies including rhetorical and discourse analysis, ethnography, integrated risk communication, and antiracist framing to topics ranging from university communications about the pandemic to groundwater pollution to upcycled art installations, in the process complicating traditional understandings of risk as something that exists "'out there,' independent of our minds and cultures, waiting to be measured" (Slovic, 1999, p. 690). Considered broadly, the collection offers human bodies and ecological impact as more effective barometers for risk than abstract calculations; individual chapters offer heuristics grounded in human experience or environmental considerations, along with discussion questions and assignments for use in classroom settings. The diversity of topics and methodologies represented ensure that the collection offers something of interest to most scholars and practitioners of risk communication, environmental communication, or embodiment in technical communication.

This article forwards a document analysis of the University Press of Colorado's publicly available academic and scholarly publishing policies and procedure materials. This analysis utilizes the online heuristic "Anti-Racist Scholarly Reviewing Practices: A Heuristic for Editors, Reviewers, and Authors," (ARRH) and a framework developed by the author that works to pinpoint places within publishing policy and process documents that may allow for discriminatory and oppressive practice. To conclude, this article forwards tangible changes to academic publishing process documents to ensure that inclusion remains an important consideration in the drafting of publishing policy and guideline documents.

In this article, we discuss the unique challenges of Community-Engaged User Experience (CEUX) by using storytelling and present a framework of emergent patterns (brown, 2017) to make visible labor, practice, and messiness of the process of building, maintaining, and renewing partnerships with community members and partners. We share three models for CEUX engagements: one-to-many, many-to-many, and one-to-plural. Within the models, we detail the structure of each CEUX engagement, what students did, and the affordances and constraints of each model. In addition, we share thoughts or voices from the community partners or collaborators or students engaged in the projects. We conclude by connecting the models to the elements of Emergent Strategy in the section From Patterns to Possibilities where we call on fellow instructors and community partners to embrace abundance-oriented questions.

In the wake of the controversy surrounding the new AI chatbot application, ChatGPT, I wonder how Logie would seek to include this new technology in his work. I ponder this because, throughout the book, Logie presents compelling evidence for why the concepts of invention, composition, and internetworked writing should be embraced and not feared. While some denounce the application and take to social media to disparage the possible negative impact on students, creativity, and composition, ChatGPT, I believe Logie would argue, would be a powerful tool we can implement to become "composers." He believes that through cloud computing services we are now more apt to collaborate, use, remix, and create rhetorical modes that extend far beyond the formulaic argument, therefore we are composers. So, Logie applies the idea of a composer as someone who is a "prosumer" (Toffler). This composer is media literate and transforms traditional rhetorical canons into multimodal compositions such as memes, Google Docs, and digital collages. However, his overarching argument is that internetworked writing tools have democratized writing through that same offering of innovative outlets. His book is arranged in a way that walks the reader through this argument.

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.

In this dialogue, four recently commenced PhD students discuss and thus expound upon how their community-engaged research shaped their methodologies and vice versa. The four authors explain how they each individually overcame the double-binds of identities, space, and time associated with graduate school and community partnerships. They conclude by detailing how, in overcoming these double-binds, they were able to enact community-engaged practices not only tied to their respective methodologies but also focused on equity and social justice.

Artists are an important, but under-recognized, aspect of rural community growth. This research article details a collaborative project between a statewide arts organization and academic researchers in West Virginia designed to document the needs of under-represented artists across the state. We share our theoretical approach that meshes stakeholder and standpoint theory and our research approach that uses participatory and arts-based methods such as asset-mapping and collage-based listening sessions. Ultimately, we provide a model for others interested in research projects that explicitly prioritize coalition-building throughout a project and demonstrate how cultural (in)equity shapes multiple facets of community life.

This experience report offers an applied example of coalitional communication design, written collaboratively by a white faculty member for a student grant writing program and a Black executive director of a community organization. Highlighting the needs, thought processes, and practical considerations of doing antiracist technical communication work collaboratively from varied identity positions, we detail an ongoing effort to redesign a Black community organization's public voice to honor Black humanity and communal healing. This example spotlights the possibilities of coalitional technical writing that deeply engages with and supports community needs, one way to meet the challenge of TPC's social justice imperative.

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.

As artificial intelligence (AI) automates technical and dialogic processes, technical communicators produce value through articulating complex problems, facilitating new forms of participation, and managing user-generated content via experience architecture. Automated and intelligent agents are least able to grasp the context of experiences, requiring human input/feedback for maximum performance. The examples we trace both prepare communities to embrace AI as part of the available information infrastructure and create an automated infrastructure of intelligent augmented action. Following Star's anthropological investigation of infrastructure, we analyze organizational examples where rhetoric entangles AI, automation, generative design, additive manufacturing, gift labor, and assembly lines.

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.

In this teaching experience report, we describe a research experience for undergraduates (REUs) designed to cognitively support the work of two student research assistants (RAs) from a two-year college (2YC) on a funded project that involved analyzing user-generated content for an mHealth app. First, we suggest partnerships between two- and four-year institutions as a move toward REU equity because students from 2YCs are not typically afforded these opportunities. We then review the role of research in undergraduate learning and posit the importance of scaffolding to sequence cognitive leaps. Finally, we present the cognitive scaffolding we created and connect it to our hybrid card sorting-affinity diagramming content analysis method.

As the field of technical and professional communication (TPC) has moved toward more inclusive perspectives, the use of decolonial frameworks has increased rapidly. However, TPC scholarship designed using decolonial frameworks lacks a clear, centralized definition and may overgeneralize and/or marginalize Indigenous concerns. Using a corpus analysis of TPC texts, we assess the ways that the field uses "decolonial" and propose a centralized definition of "decolonial" that focuses on rematriation of Indigenous land and knowledges. Further, we offer a heuristic that aids scholars in communication design appropriate for decolonial research and teaching strategies.

Technical communication and user experience studies traditionally uphold Western onto-epistemological distinctions between technical users and objects. Recent calls for the inclusion of cultural approaches to technical communication, however, have asked scholars to consider the influence cultural knowledge has on communication design. This article takes up these calls by reading technical documentation through new materialist and Indigenous ways of knowing. Using a prominent Jewish cemetery in Gainesville, Florida as a case study, this article treats technical artifacts and subjects as co-constitutive, arguing for the cultural and material agency of technical documentation design in mediating and shaping user experience.

I still remember the feeling. I was beginning the 2nd year of my PhD program and was finally feeling like I had an understanding of what being a technical communication scholar means. I was also starting to feel critical of our field---wondering if I, an Indigenous scholar from rural Alaska, would find a meaningful place in technical and professional communication (TPC). I was at the grocery store and my phone dinged; I had received an email from Natasha Jones. She and her coauthors were writing a book and wanted to include a list of multiply marginalized and underrepresented (MMU) scholars to amplify in its pages. They asked if I wanted to be part of their list and if I knew others who should be added. I emailed back immediately thanking them, consenting, and gave them my friends Zarah Moeggenberg and Les Hutchinson's names. I paid for my groceries, walked out to my truck, and cried.

Read and considered thoughtfully, Safiya Umoja Noble'sAlgorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racismis devastating. It reduces to rubble the notion that technology is neutral and ideology-free. Noble's crushing the neutrality myth does several things. First, this act lays foundations for her argument: only if you recognize and understand that technology is built with, and integrates, bias, can you then be open to her primary thesis: search engines advance discriminatory and often racist content. Second, it banishes a convenient response for many self-identified meritocratic Silicon Valley "winners" and their supporters. Post-reading, some individuals may retain their beliefs in a neutral and ideology-free technology in spite of the overwhelming evidence and citations Noble brings to bear. Effective countering of Noble's claims is unlikely to occur. For professionals working in technology, information, argumentation, and/or rhetorical studies,Algorithms of Oppressionis refreshing. Agonistic towards structural racism and its defenses, single-minded in its evidentiary presentation, collaborative in its acknowledgement of others' scholarship and research, Noble models many academic, critical, and social moves. Technology scholars and writers will find inAlgorithms of Oppressiona masterful mentor text on how to be an activist researcher scholar. Noble also makes this enjoyable reading. It is uncommon to find academic books that can simultaneously be read, used, and applied by academics and non-academics alike.

In 2016, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe founded the Sacred Stone Camp to protest Dakota Access Pipeline construction. The ensuing conflict was constructed both physically and digitally --- especially through maps. These maps made strategic inclusions and exclusions, which in turn offered differing concepts of civic, national, and historical identity. In this study, I trace some of these stories, inviting technical and professional communicators to rethink how they visualize systemic issues involving human and nonhuman ecologies. Finally, I suggest the idea of a 'folded rhetoric' to describe a strategic, ethical goal for technical communication in the age of environmental crisis.

In the August 2015Communication Design Quarterly (CDQ)special issue on Rhetoric of Health and Medicine (RHM), Lisa Meloncon and Erin Frost introduced readers to this "emerging field." Since aPoiroicommentary in 2013 written by Scott, Segal, and Keränen, numerous scholars that earlier identified our sub-discipline with the termsmedical rhetoric,have embraced this what might be seen as a more inclusive term, although I would argue that for some of us, the termrhetoricalready included at least every possible manifestation of health, medicine and language. However, RHM does indeed cast a wider net, as pointed out in the 2015 issue, including essays on architecture, social work, and psychology. While rhetoric per se is certainly found within all fields, if writing about such fields and especially from such fields is included in RHM, then such a transdisciplinary impulse takes us very much further indeed. While this particular issue can easily find itself under the RHM umbrella, these particular scholars writing here were invited because they had participated in 2016 as a very successful panel at SIGDOC annual conference. These five scholars have much to share and teach us, as well as move us forward in our thinking, research, writing and participation in health and medical settings.

This paper presents the results of a case study focusing on information and communication design in indigenous villages of rural India. The villages examined for this study were geographically remote and socio-economically underdeveloped, and their populations represented individuals who possessed low levels of literacy, limited language proficiency in English and mainstream Indic languages (e.g., Hindi and Bengali), and limited familiarity with computer us and computing practices. The authors sought to examine this context by conducting ethnographic field research involving a variety of methods. Through these approaches, the authors found a range of cultural and contextual factors are instrumental in shaping and co-creating communication design solutions for underserved international audiences. (Such factors include such as long-term research engagements, in-situ design development, and embracing dialogic and reflexive praxis when designing for local audiences.)

Presentations are effective ways of communicating information, especially in the field of education, but they might not be equally or fully beneficial and persuasive to all users. Each member of the audience might be interested in a particular topic, come from a different background and profession, and have his or her own personality traits. In this conceptual paper, we first describe our persuasive personalization model; the Individualization Pyramid based on Yale Attitude Change Approach. The model consists of the following main sections: selecting contents by applying segmentation, adjusting comprehensibility of the text, tailoring the language of the text to fit with user's personality and recommending content that is associated with user's personal history within the related subjects. We then propose an enhanced version of our previously published presentation builder, which uses users' digital traces such as those on social media to personalize presentation content. Finally, we highlight the available tools and algorithms to assist us with developing the system.

In this poster presentation, the author traces health communication in online spaces, especially conversations about hypothyroidism on Twitter. Specifically, the author looks at how participants on Twitter use the hashtag #hypothyroidism for patient agency and advocacy. The strength of ties between #hypothyroidism (the Twitter hashtag) and the actors necessary for its existence is also discussed. This poster presentation argues that Twitter can strengthen patient agency and advocacy in both online and offline relationships between hypothyroidism patients and healthcare professionals. Patient agency and advocacy is accomplished because Twitter helps to build communities of support between and among patients and professionals through the immediacy and accessibility of information.

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.