The CIA's Operation PBSuccess represents a pivotal moment in Cold War securitization that illuminates technical communication's role in security contexts. We use Haas and Frost's apparent decolonial feminist (ADF) rhetoric of risk to trace how communicators mediated security logics across cultures and networks while exploiting technological asymmetries between the US and Guatemala. Building on theories of risk and (in)security framing, we demonstrate how the scriptwriters and hosts of Radio Liberación , as technical communicators, functioned as security actors complicit in the decades-long aftermath. We conclude by calling on technical communicators to approach risk communication through continued decolonial praxis.

Despite the recent surge in social justice and decolonial scholarship, technical and professional communication (TPC) research remains a potential site of oppression. This article is meant to be a call to action; it attempts to (re)ignite discussions about what we value and how we express what we value. It encourages the field of TPC to be more responsive to the experiences and struggles of research participants—those we engage during our knowledge production process. I explore what I call oppressive rhetoric in TPC research with a specific focus on the term subjects in institutional review board forms and in the reporting of some TPC research about research participants. I assert that in spite of our best efforts in advancing the goals of marginalized groups and despite the forward-looking trajectory of progressive research, more work needs to be done to address oppressive rhetoric in TPC scholarship.

This article argues that many methodological approaches used in intercultural technical communication research are limited in addressing emerging social justice challenges in many post-colonial, developing, and unenfranchised/disenfranchised cultural sites, where professional communicators have begun conducting research. It offers decolonial approaches as an alternative by highlighting how these approaches are used in an intercultural research that investigates attempts to localize communication that accompanies sexuo-pharmaceuticals from one cultural context to another. The article also discusses some the challenges and benefits of such approaches. The ways in which scientific research is implicated in the worst excesses of colonialism remain a powerfully remembered history for many of the world's colonized peoples. It is a history that still offends the deepest sense of our humanity [1, p. 1]. Global research raises many methodological and ethical challenges for technical communicators … because of the cross-cultural, international, and transnational nature of the work [2, p. 283].