We ask, “What genre conventions are shared in 18th- and 21st-century midwifery manuals?” The article responds to this question by situating manuals as cultural arbiters and defining genre in a cultural context. The article identifies parallels between 18th-century and 21st-century midwifery manuals that focus on the rhetorical situation (via front matter, including title pages and prefaces) and accessibility of information (via design, definitions, and step-by-step procedures). Midwifery practices have changed drastically in the modern era, but the underlying goals—safety and health for the birthing person and child—remain constant. Increased publication of manuals dedicated to midwifery in the 18th century suggests a heightened focus on practices leading to successful outcomes in childbirth that highlight the value of examining manuals as a genre reflecting humanistic elements in technical documents. We argue that midwifery manuals emphasize underlying ideologies in the production and reproduction of socio-cultural consciousness still present today.

The use of generative artificial intelligence (GAI) large language models has increased in both professional and classroom technical writing settings. One common response to student use of GAI is to increase surveillance, incorporating plagiarism detection services or banning certain composing activities from the classroom. This paper argues such measures are harmful and instead proposes a “CARE” framework: critical, authorial, rhetorical, and educational—a nuanced approach emphasizing ethical and contextual AI use in technical writing classrooms. This framework aligns with plagiarism best practices, initially devised from when rhetoric and composition scholars considered the pedagogical implications of the Internet.

This descriptive narrative depicts an academic program that deploys a collaborative project model for delivering concurrent multimedia courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Applying this model, online master’s students who are studying the management of technical communication activities remotely manage teams of on-campus undergraduate students who are studying multimedia production skills. The author piloted the collaborative project model during a recent academic term. Student response to the format was overwhelmingly positive from both graduates and undergraduates, and the resulting projects were of exceptional quality and well received by their respective clients.

Today, diseases can spread internationally faster and farther than ever before, and a range of public health issues can “go global” quickly and easily. The challenge becomes communicating ideas of care—that is, issues of health and wellness—across different cultures, languages, and geopolitical contexts. Doing so involves understanding the dynamics of such factors and how to apply this knowledge effectively. The entries in this special issue examine such factors and provide readers with frameworks for understanding and strategies for addressing these issues.

This article describes an interdisciplinary partnership that resulted in the introduction of a writing coach into an MBA class on critical and analytical thinking. By examining the response to this role by the writing coaches themselves and by the students enrolled in three sections of this new course, this exploratory study endeavors to answer the question: How can a writing coach best support student writing in an MBA course? Major findings are that students predominantly liked receiving written feedback and mini-lectures by the writing coaches, mini-lectures were met with mixed reviews, and there was a strong perception by participants that their writing had improved.

The Minnesota Sex Offender Program (MSOP) offers treatment to sex offenders civilly confined after they complete their prison sentences. In this article, we enhance the notion of kairos in rhetorical situations with the perceptions of risk and the sociological concept of moral panic by tracing three kairotic moments involving MSOP: the 1992 Dennis Linehan civil commitment case; the 2003 murder of college student Dru Sjodin; and the 2012 provisional discharge of Clarence Opheim. We examine the political, public, and media response to these events and provide the results of 21 interviews with stakeholders. In doing so, we hope to illustrate how moral panic and risk perception can so influence what seems the right choice at the right time that stakeholders may get caught in what we call kairotic cycles, where solutions to a problem are stymied by competing perceptions and by entrenched positions that reoccur over time and without resolution.

Scholars in business and technical communication have continuously made efforts to look for effective teaching approaches for cross-cultural business and technical communication; however, little research has been conducted to study the process by which students develop intercultural competence; fewer studies have been conducted to assess learners' needs for gaining intercultural competence in the globalization age. To assess students' level of intercultural competence and understand whether they are likely to change in response to teaching, I first introduce a two-part framework for teaching and learning intercultural business and technical communication: the DMIS model—Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity, and the related instrument to assess intercultural sensitivity—the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI). Then I report the results of using the framework to assess and develop students' intercultural competence, and conclude the study by emphasizing the significance of the current empirical research and discuss the framework's limitations.

This article examines how two print media outlets, one liberal and one conservative, contextualize the 2008 bank bailout. It argues that political media can be seen as examples of Appadurai's localities, promoting individual identity through the creation of narratives of the Other, in keeping with Said's study of Orientalism. By comparing the localizing techniques used in response to the unique political situation of the bailout vote, it is possible to determine the extent to which liberal and conservative localities share identity-producing techniques, and also the extent to which each ideological locality maintains an identity distinct from the partisan localities of the two major U.S. political parties. The results indicate that in this instance both localities share localizing techniques, but differ in their relation to their associated political parties, with the conservative locality subsumed into the Republican Party, but the liberal locality clearly distinct from the Democratic Party.