This study examines the role of risk visualizations in public health communication through an analysis of the MyWater-Flint Map and Flint Service Line Map , developed during the Flint water crisis. Applying a newly proposed social justice-oriented framework for risk visual design, the study evaluates these maps' effectiveness in communicating risk through dimensions of accessibility, accountability, ethics, productive usability, hybrid collectivity, open systems, and circulation. Findings highlight the importance of community participation in the production and dissemination of risk visualizations. This work sheds light on visual risk communication theory, professional practice, and technical communication instruction.

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.

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.

In Amplifying Voices in UX, a diverse group of scholars and practitioners come together to explore different aspects of user experience (UX) with a focus on inclusivity and social justice. This book moves beyond conventional UX frameworks, presenting innovative pedagogical strategies and methodologies that highlight empathy, accessibility, and the importance of considering marginalized voices in design. The authors delve into areas often overlooked in mainstream UX discourse, offering new perspectives on how to create more inclusive and impactful user experiences.

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.

Over the course of my friendship with Dr. Halcyon Lawrence, I would often spend weekday evenings completing a mundane chore like washing dishes or feeding the cat. I would then hear my phone's alert for an incoming text message: "I need company. Are you working tonight?" Within 30 minutes or so Halcyon and I were on Zoom, cameras off, and nothing displayed on screen but our login names. Other times I'd receive a text like "I need your advice. Do you have time?" and we convened over the phone. When we talked, answers to our mutual question "How was your day?" prompted stories, and those stories led to musings and reflections. When I became befuddled when an assignment would flop or disappointed by a flat discussion, Halcyon gently queried, "So what were you trying to do?" or "Why do you think that activity didn't go well?" Her responses always reoriented me. When venting was no longer productive, we teased apart the problem, speculating what skill or knowledge students needed but had not sufficiently developed. These conversations often gave me enthusiasm for a new pedagogical approach or revealed insights about the gaps in our teaching and our students' learning. In the months since Halcyon's passing, I miss most acutely these nightly conversations about what was happening in our classrooms. My goal in this essay is to underscore the fact that part of Halcyon's legacy as a social justice-oriented technical communication scholar is her ethos as a teacher and collaborator who cared capaciously about student learning and the development of teaching practices and assignments.

In the Fall of 2023, my professor, a fellow graduate student, and I dedicated months of intensive work to a project that held great significance for us because of its relevance to human values and the broader conversation on social justice. We applied to a conference and were eager to disseminate our methodology and findings. This conference promised to be a landmark experience for me; it was going to be my first time attending this conference and an opportunity to present our work to a like-minded audience. We were accepted and the schedule listed our presentation last on the panel. I anticipated our presentation with a mix of excitement and responsibility.

Have you ever wondered how a researcher from the periphery can gain an enduring foothold in the pantheon of researchers from the center? This essay will attempt to answer that question. Halcyon Lawrence was a researcher, writer, and professor from the Global South who has made a mark on a community of technical communication scholars, writers, researchers, and professors with her widely discussed research articles dealing with the pros and cons, perils and promises, boon and bane of speech recognition tools and technology. Lawrence's research explores the thickets of speech recognition and proposes strategic and revisionary measures toward neutralizing the lopsided corpora of speech recognition software, vaporware, and artificial intelligence (AI)-powered technology. To crystalize her contributions to justice, data justice, and racial-linguistic justice, I chose a chapter, "Siri Discipline," she (2021) wrote for the book Your Computer is on Fire (Mullaney et al, 2021). My essay highlights how her ideas have gained more traction in relation to the current disruption of the AI revolution (Gopal, 2020). That disruption is often exemplified through ChatGPT, a platform that shows how Lawrence's core insight from "Siri Discipline" can have a direct bearing on normative frameworks being developed to address burgeoning challenges ushered in by the AI revolution.

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.

Have you ever wondered how a researcher from the periphery can gain an enduring foothold in the pantheon of researchers from the center? This essay will attempt to answer that question. Halcyon Lawrence was a researcher, writer, and professor from the Global South who has made a mark on a community of technical communication scholars, writers, researchers, and professors with her widely discussed research articles dealing with the pros and cons, perils and promises, boon and bane of speech recognition tools and technology. Lawrence's research explores the thickets of speech recognition and proposes strategic and revisionary measures toward neutralizing the lopsided corpora of speech recognition software, vaporware, and artificial intelligence (AI)-powered technology. To crystalize her contributions to justice, data justice, and racial-linguistic justice, I chose a chapter, "Siri Discipline," she (2021) wrote for the book Your Computer is on Fire (Mullaney et al, 2021). My essay highlights how her ideas have gained more traction in relation to the current disruption of the AI revolution (Gopal, 2020). That disruption is often exemplified through ChatGPT, a platform that shows how Lawrence's core insight from "Siri Discipline" can have a direct bearing on normative frameworks being developed to address burgeoning challenges ushered in by the AI revolution.

Over the course of my friendship with Dr. Halcyon Lawrence, I would often spend weekday evenings completing a mundane chore like washing dishes or feeding the cat. I would then hear my phone's alert for an incoming text message: "I need company. Are you working tonight?" Within 30 minutes or so Halcyon and I were on Zoom, cameras off, and nothing displayed on screen but our login names. Other times I'd receive a text like "I need your advice. Do you have time?" and we convened over the phone. When we talked, answers to our mutual question "How was your day?" prompted stories, and those stories led to musings and reflections. When I became befuddled when an assignment would flop or disappointed by a flat discussion, Halcyon gently queried, "So what were you trying to do?" or "Why do you think that activity didn't go well?" Her responses always reoriented me. When venting was no longer productive, we teased apart the problem, speculating what skill or knowledge students needed but had not sufficiently developed. These conversations often gave me enthusiasm for a new pedagogical approach or revealed insights about the gaps in our teaching and our students' learning. In the months since Halcyon's passing, I miss most acutely these nightly conversations about what was happening in our classrooms. My goal in this essay is to underscore the fact that part of Halcyon's legacy as a social justice-oriented technical communication scholar is her ethos as a teacher and collaborator who cared capaciously about student learning and the development of teaching practices and assignments.

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 the Fall of 2023, my professor, a fellow graduate student, and I dedicated months of intensive work to a project that held great significance for us because of its relevance to human values and the broader conversation on social justice. We applied to a conference and were eager to disseminate our methodology and findings. This conference promised to be a landmark experience for me; it was going to be my first time attending this conference and an opportunity to present our work to a like-minded audience. We were accepted and the schedule listed our presentation last on the panel. I anticipated our presentation with a mix of excitement and responsibility.

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.

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.

Eli Goldblatt and David A. Jolliffe's 2020 Literacy as Conversation: Learning Networks in Urban and Rural Communities is to be interpreted as a "book of essays" and, more importantly, as vivid and lived conversations that aim to showcase nearly three decades of friendship between two colleagues concerned about meaningful community participation and literacy. This collection captures their reflections on their participation in community-based projects within the urban neighborhoods of Philadelphia and rural and semirural towns of Arkansas, but also offers an expanded and active understanding of literacy as social practice with complex relationships between sponsors, learning networks, power, and taking place in non-school environments having an access point through conversation and written symbols. Goldblatt and Jolliffe's endeavor to highlight the social connections and complexity of literacy aligns with their intent to include not just scholars in higher education, but also "everyday folk" or ordinary people including educators, government officials and policy makers, and people from all walks of life. As a scholar of color and teacher of a Hispanic-serving institution and as a community member of a predominantly Hispanic city in Texas, I was immediately intrigued and captured by the authors' commitment to highlight the stories of people who persevere and design interventions to construct hope and shape themselves and the world into a better place.

The use of images of students from traditionally underrepresented racial and ethnic backgrounds in college recruitment materials presents a seemingly difficult dilemma. Should colleges and universities use diversity in recruitment materials to try and attract students from underrepresented racial and ethnic backgrounds even if those images do not accurately represent the amount of diversity at the university? To discover student perceptions relating to this question, I used a mixed-methods approach in which I surveyed 117 students and then interviewed 10 survey participants. Survey and interview questions were based on utilitarian versus deontological ethics with an emphasis on whether exaggerating diversity in recruitment materials is ethl. The results of this exploratory study showed that most students believe using a disproportionate amount of diversity in recruitment materials is unethical. Student participants who identified as a person from an underrepresented racial/ethnic group indicated that it is unethical to exaggerate diversity in recruitment materials at a higher percentage than their white counterparts. This is likely because people from underrepresented backgrounds face a much higher risk of harm from misleading recruitment materials than their white peers.

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.

Building on the work of technical communication scholars concerned with social justice and electoral politics, this article examines the Coray for Congress (1994) campaign as a case study to argue in support of a more formal disciplinary commitment to political technical communication (PxTC). Specifically, I closely analyze the ideographic communication design of pre-digital PxTC artifacts from the campaign archive. The type of pre-digital political communication design products analyzed in this article are ubiquitous even today. The implications of four dominant ideographs are analyzed in this case study: <jobs>, <communities>, <families>, and <"see PDF">. Key takeaways for PxTC practitioners, educators, and scholars are discussed.

Discussions about communication and education have become focused on social justice in recent years, and with good reason. Social justice is at the forefront of many aspects of our daily lives in news, education, and even entertainment. As digital rhetoricians and educators, we have found ourselves looking for ways to work at the intersections of our field and social justice to improve both learning experiences and networked communication in non-academic contexts. This work is both timely and needed, as the hierarchies and inequities experienced in "real life" often translate to, and are amplified by, networked and digital forms of engagement. Fortunately, Rhetoric, Technology, and the Virtues offers an insightful and practical discussion about ethical frameworks that contribute to our understanding of digital social justice. Colton and Holmes persuasively argue for the value of Aristotle's virtue ethics, especially the idea of hexis , as a model for empowering students, educators, and others to enact digital social justice. As they explain, Aristotle identified virtues "such as patience, courage, temperance, and liberality" that contribute to ethical behavior and "are developed not solely through reason or by learning rules but through practice of the emotional and social skills that enable us within a community to work toward...human flourishing and general well-being" (p. 32). An essential part of Aristotle's framework is hexis , a person's disposition that has been crafted through habit and repeated practice (p. 11). Colton and Holmes effectively demonstrate how a virtue ethics framework can empower individuals to take ownership of the ethical implications of digital practices. Throughout the book, Colton and Holmes address familiar topics in digital rhetoric ranging from captioning (pp. 3--5, 49--73), remixing (pp. 74--94), and issues inherent in online activism (pp. 95--126).

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.

Recent research in technical communication (TC) indicates that the field has become more varied than ever in terms of job titles, job skills, and levels of involvement in the design and production process. Here, we examine this diversity by detailing the results of a small-scale anonymous survey of individuals who are currently working as technical communicators (TCs). The purpose of our survey was to discover what job titles people who identify as TCs have held and the skills required of those positions. The study was conducted using the online survey platform Qualtrics. Survey results found that TCs occupy jobs and use skills that are often quite different from "traditional" TC careers. Results further support previous research that these roles and responsibilities continue to evolve. However, results also suggest that this evolution is more sweeping than previously realized---moving TCs away from not only the traditional technical writing role but also the "technical communicator" role as it has been understood for the past 20--25 years.

Drawing on narratives (Jones, 2016; Jones & Walton, 2018) from bilingual technical communication projects, this article makes a case for the importance of considering language access and accessibility in crafting and sharing digital research. Connecting conversations in disability studies and language diversity, the author emphasizes how an interdependent (Price, 2011; Price & Kerchbaum, 2016), intersectional (Crenshaw, 1989; Medina & Haas, 2018) orientation to access through disability studies and translation can help technical communication researchers to design and disseminate digital research that is accessible to audiences from various linguistic backgrounds and who also identify with various dis/abilities.

This special issue contains proceedings from the 6 th Annual Symposium on Communicating Complex Information (SCCI), which ran from February 27 th through 28 th 2017 at East Carolina University in Greenville, NC. The program chair was Michael Albers, who, as usual at SCCI, did a fantastic job at collecting and curating two days of stimulating conversations generated by speakers from a broad range of fields---rhetoric, technical communication, medical and regulatory writing, user experience, information science, and design---and a broad range or institutions and workspaces, including Duke's Network Analysis Center, The Medical University of South Carolina, Mälardalen University in Sweden, and Michigan State University, to name just a few. The keynote---titled "Faulty by Design: A Psychological Examination of User Decision-Making"---was given by Bill Gribbons, director of Bentley University's Graduate User Experience Program. Overall, the diversity and depth of the scholars and their research combined with the single-room presentation space facilitated conversation and networking in ways not typically found at other conferences.

Employing Royster and Kirsch's (2012) concept of critical imagination, the authors imagine strategies communication designers might use to intervene in and disrupt racial injustice and oppression. Using activity trackers as technologies that communicate data about health and death, the authors retell and re-envision the case of Eric Garner, a victim of police brutality, and argue that data from activity trackers can potentially be used to reframe narratives about public health and policing. Further, through an examination of the rhetorical frames of dehumanization, disbelief, and dissociation, the authors assert that activity trackers, as communicative agents, may become transformative wearable devices that are developed and deployed with socially just communication design in mind.

Meloncon's Rhetorical Accessability explores the connections between critical work in disability studies and technical communication. The first collection of its kind, included essays combine theory and practice to emphasize the value of placing disability studies at the forefront of design, workplace practices, and pedagogies. Echoing the diversity of scholarship that has contributed to this emerging area of study---from disability studies, technical communication, rhetoric, and literacy studies--- the collection emphasizes technical communication as a crucial multidisciplinary ground for critical discourse regarding disability and accessibility. As a whole, Meloncon's collection initiates a broader scholarly conversation centered on issues of accessibility in various technical communication contexts.

We believe that one of the major research questions that will drive the field of technical communication during the next 5--10 years is, "How can technical communication scholars navigate increasingly cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary, and cross-organizational contexts to support social justice through better communication?"

Today, the process of image management is extremely time-consuming for IT administrators. Until now, this complicated process has not been extensively explored by design researchers. During a recent research study at Citrix, we interviewed 17 IT professionals. We used a process we call "adaptive interviewing," a flexible methodology that could accommodate the various infrastructures of IT organizations and the diversity of ways that administrators handle image management. While conducting our interviews, we worked with our information designer to create several visualizations of our data. Ultimately, we found that supplementing interviews with information visualizations is a powerful way to explore, understand, and explain the complex system of IT image management.