Front matter for Reflections Volume 22, Issue 2, Spring 2023 issue.

In this article, we document how Twitter is embedded within the U.S.-Mexico border and used to reorganize the oppressive conditions perpetuated by the border’s sociopolitical history. We do so through a mixed-methods case-study of three polarized, yet tangled, activist movements on Twitter, each of which responded to Trump’s border wall plans and zero-tolerance policy that separated asylum-seeking im/migrant children from their families. The hashtag movements included the liberal #FamiliesBelongTogether supporters (FBT), Trump Republican #BuildTheWall supporters (BTW), and liberal Anti-Wall (AW) #NoBorderWall and #TrumpShutDown denouncers. Findings indicate how the liberal activist movements inherited systemic issues of the broader U.S.-Mexico border infrastructure. Overall, we call for TPC to continue developing research agendas that learn from social activist networks so the field can understand its role in shaping the broader media infrastructure.

This article builds on the authors’ 2021 ATTW keynote, “The Power of Language in Building Confianza with Communities.” It emphasizes the importance of maintaining confianza (trust/confidence) over time and encourages researchers to share results in accessible and usable ways for community members who participated in their projects. Drawing from their work with a group of promotores de salud (health promoters) and the promotores’ work with the 2020 Census, the authors share guiding questions for both community leaders and researchers to consider when engaging in projects together. Ultimately, they discuss the importance of planning for a “dissemination phase” that leaves behind herramientas (tools) and does more than simply share information without regard for how community members may want to access and use that information in the future.

This article weaves narrative, tweets, relevant literature, and conference session summaries from the 2021 ATTW Virtual Conference. Topics include discussion of power, language, and a short guide for graduate students (predominantly first-generation) to assist with navigating virtual conferences. The article includes questions and ideas that scholars in technical communication may be interested in further exploring, and urges such scholars/instructors in positions of privilege to support graduate students. The reflections center a graduate student’s position as a white cisgender woman and first-generation college student exploring the uncertainties involved with attending and navigating power relations at a virtual conference. This positionality informs a reflection of sessions from panels such as the DBLAC Anti-Racist Writing Workshop, Responsive Technical Communication Pedagogies and Institutional Practices, Critical Technical Communication Practices and Pedagogies, User-Generated Content and its Effects on the Technical Communication Profession, Technologies and Pedagogies, and more.

Although we had not shared ideas before the 2021 ATTW conference, we noticed during our panel that we had considerable overlaps in our pedagogical approaches and goals for encouraging students’ social justice advocacy. This reflection discusses those overlaps while acknowledging how our different positionalities affect our approaches. One takeaway of this article is deliverables from our presentations, including citation lists and illustrations that might help other educators. The other takeaway is seven of our overlapping pedagogical approaches (three that affect course structure and four that concern day-to-day interactions) that we hope will provide other TPC educators with ideas on how to adapt to students’ positionalities while fostering students’ ability to see themselves as social justice advocates.

Small-scale fishers comprise nearly all capture fishery jobs, bring known benefits to biodiversity management, and, until recently, have provided humanity with the large majority of its seafood. Despite these well-documented benefits, small-scale fishers face increasingly intense displacement because of the marine closure pathway for biodiversity repair that is forwarded in the first draft of the Post-2020 Biodiversity Framework. In this paper, I analyze and contextualize conflated and extracted informational foci in marine science policy documents in order to illustrate that diminishing contexts for small-scale fisher value move through biodiversity policy texts to occupy priority positions in the first draft of the Post-2020 Biodiversity Framework.

Welcome to the 23rd ATTW Conference—ATTW’s first virtual conference! And thank you for joining us today, especially given the collective and personal trauma you’ve experienced over the past year. We appreciate you making and holding space for the important work happening in our community. Originally planned for Milwaukee, WI, the pandemic postponement of our conference has allowed us to convene online this year from all over the nation and beyond. I am grateful for the places and spaces that have held us up since last March and for the networks and ecologies that will sustain us and our technologies this week, including landbases, waterways, flora, and fauna.

This article intersects the US government’s imperialistic attitude with its ambivalent and sluggish behavior towards helping the island of Puerto Rico achieve disaster preparedness and recovery from hurricane events. To learn how Puerto Rican residents employed self-reliance and resiliency in the context of disaster to shift and extend past definitions of tactical technical communication, I triangulated US-based longform reports with a radio journalist’s logbook from Hurricane María. From the stories in these texts about how Puerto Ricans crafted communication, I conclude that this craftiness during disaster empowered the Puerto Rican community to enact post-Hurricane María political and social changes on the island.

This article reports on the three sessions of the 2021 ATTW Virtual Conference including the Keynote Address and connects them to three other sessions through the lens of social justice to navigate the intersections of language, access, material ecologies, and social infrastructures. Echoing the conference theme, I suggest that those sessions attend to material complexities and local conditions and help us recognize culturally and locally responsive approaches to discursive activities in research and pedagogy in the field of TPC and that this work helps technical communicators and educators sustain and advance disciplinary identities of which social justice scholarship is a central part. By using my reflections on the observed ATTW sessions, I conclude that we can adopt what I term ethical pragmatism as an actionable takeaway, which refers to practical approaches grounded in each community’s history, culture, and sociomaterial conditions.

This article interrogates the complexities of immigration encountered by international scholars working in higher education. Drawing on life history and lived experience, the article examines issues of marginalization, inequality, and discrimination. It draws from Black Feminist Care ethics to channel ideas for how to build resilience in the face of unrelenting restrictive policies that shape the daily lives of international scholars in the academy and jeopardizes their ability to succeed.

GitHub provides a project hosting platform and Git-based version control system for individuals and teams looking to develop and manage software and documentation online. Technical writers have long played an important role in this process, contributing the documentation infrastructure that organizes and sustains project development. As GitHub continues to grow in popularity, the field of technical and professional communication (TPC) educators will need to devote more effort to researching GitHub while developing both critical pedagogies and industry best practices committed to design justice. This paper provides a primer for this discussion as well as tools and scaffolding designed to assist GitHub implementation in the TPC classroom.

In this collaboratively composed article, we both theorize and dramatize the act of paying attention to scalar dynamics. In particular, we draw on the concept of transacting scales in order to complicate how “ethics” materialize in technical and professional communication (TPC). Because ethics materialize in relation to particular contexts and events, in the second half of this article, we show affordances of our approach for TPC through case studies animated by personal stories. We hope this will encourage readers to stay attuned to the particularities of embodied experiences as we theorize with unwieldy complex systems. Our cases speak to international student enrollment, matriculation, and retention in TPC programs and also general education TPC pedagogy.

The paper, titled “Wikis as Third Space for Diversifying Access for Technical Communication,” introspects the process of building a wiki site that represents the translanguaging practice of the author who is a translingual—uses Bangla and English simultaneously. In response to recent calls for a social justice approach for the field of technical communication, it details the site’s translanguaging features—as such discussions are few and far between in the field. Seamless movement between languages as displayed in the wiki site demonstrates the everyday reality of translingual people. The wiki site’s different pages document a smart Bluetooth speaker that introduces the product and details the setup process. The site also features a users’ lounge page where new and old users of the device can share their experiences and thoughts. For the visual aspects of this translingual wiki site, the author argues to also manifest its transcultural aspect as it serves a reminder of the fact that languaging practices influence cultural thinking. The resulting combination, the author explains, morphs a person holistically, instilling a metalinguistic awareness in them. In conclusion, the paper demonstrates the dynamic and transformative nature of languaging and argues these conversations regarding diverse language practices and their powerful effects and meanings should take place in technical communication more often especially since it aligns with its urge to turn to social justice approach.

In this article, we describe how technical communication students explored user advocacy and coalitional action by creating trauma-informed, intimate partner violence (IPV) awareness campaigns for our campus. The nature of this project required us to develop a trauma-informed approach to teaching at the undergraduate level. To create a supportive community of practice for instructors and students, we used a lesson study methodology in which a team of teacher-researchers collaboratively designed, observed, analyzed, and revised a sequence of lessons. We provide the larger context for our lesson study project, the lesson study structure including preparatory material for students, trauma-informed teaching strategies, and reflections on the lesson. To effect meaningful change and learning, we needed to have difficult conversations with students; this required us to acknowledge the presence of trauma in the classroom and then work to support the students who have experienced trauma. Finally, we offer a reflective critique of our experience as a heuristic for instructors to use as they implement and reflect on trauma-informed pedagogy in their own classes. Content Notice: The content of this article references rape and refers to violence against women in a way that relates to, but does not directly reference, transgender and non-binary individuals. We acknowledge, respect, and honor the many varied ways in which individuals respond to traumatic content. If you would like to speak with someone for support, please consider using the RAINN National Sexual Assault Crisis Hotline by calling their anonymous toll-free hotline (1-800-656-HOPE (4673)) or using the confidential online chat: https://hotline.rainn.org/online

This special issue contains articles, reflections, and discussions stemming from the 2021 Association of Teachers of Technical Writing (ATTW) Virtual Conference, which was themed “Language, Access, and Power in Technical Communication.” This theme was originally set for the 2020 ATTW Conference. When the conference co-chairs Ann Shivers-McNair and Laura Gonzales originally developed the theme for the 2020 ATTW conference, we drew inspiration from Dr. Cecilia Shelton’s (2020) call to “shift out of neutral” in our technical communication practices. At that time, we reflected on the ongoing racial violence perpetuated through police brutality across the world, on the border crisis that kept separate, and continues to separate children and families, and on a violent government administration that reflected the hatred too long ingrained in US nationalism. We knew that technical communicators could not and should not sit by idly and pretend to embrace a stance of neutrality amidst so much injustice.

Review of Failure Pedagogies: Learning and Unlearning What It Means to Fail, edited by Allison D. Carr and Laura R. Micciche.

Compositionists are committed to social justice in classrooms, in academia, and in our communities, but we must also respond creatively and strategically to the structural consequences of precarity capitalism, even more urgently so in the wake of Covid-19. Precarity has shaped both composition studies’ and community literacy’s histories, and compositionists have often had little choice but to develop entrepreneurial responses to austere conditions. In this article, we advocate owning up to this history so that we can more intentionally direct entrepreneurial practices toward social justice, noting that people across numerous communities have worked along these lines for some time. Justice-oriented entrepreneurship is especially relevant for community literacy practitioners. To contextualize this argument, we examine how scholars in community literacy and technical and professional communication have conceptualized entrepreneurship as an analytically useful frame and/or employed entrepreneurial practices themselves. We then unpack the work and values of justice entrepreneurship, highlighting traditions of communalist Black entrepreneurs who have fought for economic and political self-determination. Next, we offer a model of justice entrepreneurship practiced by Youth Enrichment Services, a Pittsburgh-based non-profit that has demonstrated community-responsive, entrepreneurial flexibility in confronting Covid. We conclude by considering the future of justice entrepreneurship in a society simultaneously trending toward further crises of precarity and, contradictorily, new opportunities for progressive experimentation.

This article presents a trauma-informed integrative reflection framework to make a case for prioritizing reflection during learning disruptions, especially in community-engaged learning environments. I begin by describing a community-based service-learning course “TESOL: Theory & Practice” which includes a community-engaged learning partnership between a university English department and the Adult Basic Education division at a local community college. Then, I articulate two aspects of the TESOL course developed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic: first, a framework for integrative reflection that supports adaptation and student learning throughout the semester, and second, the structures of trauma-informed reflective practice that I integrated throughout the course design. Finally, I highlight three takeaways of embracing disruption: adapting partnerships, disrupting routines, and keeping reflection at the center. Together, these themes point not only to the need for trauma-informed reflective pedagogy, but also the need to keep complicating how we live out this approach to teaching.

In this article, we share our reflections as a teacher, students, and community organization on establishing an international community partnership course that drew United States’ Virginia Tech University students into dialogue with the Nepal-based Code for Nepal (registered as a non-profit in the US), an organization that serves rural communities by enhancing digital literacy skills of women and young girls. By reflecting on our partnership, we argue that international engagements, premised on equity as a goal and conducted digitally, will help in creating opportunities for the students as well as the communities in tackling the digital divide via writing and designing conducted in the pursuit of enhancing the digital literacy of the rural communities in need.

Review of Rewriting Partnerships: Community Perspectives on Community-Based Learning by Rachael W. Shah.

This article details a flood-focused, community-based writing course that was derailed by the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis to argue that despite major challenges, the course helped to prepare students to face some of the fear and uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic, offered them a space through weekly reflection responses to process their isolation, and positioned them to more capaciously empathize with community members who had lived through the trauma of persistent, catastrophic flooding. The stunted community-based learning course still allowed students to contribute to the work of the community partner and offered unexpected chances for students to process their own trauma. By the end of the semester, students emphasized the importance of community-based learning for cultivating the kinds of empathy and critical civic responsibility they felt would become necessities in a COVID-19 and post-COVID-19 world. We detail some of the important lessons of adapting the course to the COVID-19 crisis and suggest pathways for other faculty and community partners to build flexible, long-term collaborations that can not only ride out traumatic interruptions but actually provide students with the equipment they need to navigate these challenges.

“What is a zine? My definition: For me a zine is not just a self-made and self-published booklet but it is also situated within DIY culture. This means it is non-profit, non-commercial, low-budget, and non-competitive. Topics and style can vary but it’s important that zines remain accessible … (everyone can afford them) and to writers (everyone can make them). Zines don’t exist as little paper islands but they are connected and blossom within a mutually supportive zine community.” —Nina, Scissors & Chainsaws #2

On March 12th, 2020, faculty, staff, and students at Auburn University (AU) received an email announcing that the school would “transition from on-campus instruction to remote delivery beginning Monday, March 16 and continue through April 10 in response to concerns about the spread of the coronavirus (COVID-19)” (“Auburn University”). As all classes would be delivered remotely, students were told not to return to campus after spring break, leaving many of them to wonder if and when they’d be able to retrieve their belongings from housing.

This essay tracks Asian/American movements through the COVID-19 pandemic and through the discipline over time. Using a listing methodology with attention to space and place, we historicize how discourses of disease, contagion, and infection have been used to fuel yellow peril rhetorics in the service of anti-Asian racism since at least the 1850s, drawing connections between this history and contemporary anti-Asian racism in public spaces, in the discipline, and in academia. We conclude by revisioning how we move through disciplinary spaces, encouraging a situated recursive spatial movement as a way to advance an ethic of care and community.

The COVID-19 outbreak impacted regional Australia in ways yet to be measured; for many of the country’s regions, the pandemic immediately followed natural disasters including droughts and bushfires. In such affected regional communities, activities such as writing offer opportunities for pleasure, engagement, and connectedness. Yet the restrictions developed in response to COVID-19, such as the need to move traditionally face-to-face learning online, significantly disrupted the usual way of undertaking these activities. For the New England Writers Centre (NEWC), a productive community writing organisation operating in the North Western part of the state of New South Wales in Australia. These restrictions required both quick responses and more long-term consideration of the ways writing instruction is delivered to the community it serves. This profile provides an example of a community-based writing project, an online course in writing historical fiction, developed in response to COVID-19 restrictions. The profile offers three distinct perspectives on the course: Chair of the New England Writers Centre, Sophie Masson, gives an overview of the Centre’s role in the region, the effect of the pivot to online teaching on the centre’s programming, and the initial learnings that impact the centre; online workshop facilitator Ariella Van Luyn provides an overview of the pedagogical design principles and learning objectives underpinning the design of the course and her observations of participant engagement; and NEWC program director and workshop participant Lynette Aspey reflects on her experiences learning online. Together, these three perspectives offer initial findings about online community writing instruction useful to other regional writing organisations.

Academic scholarship can often seem an indulgence. Often focused on a particular aspect of a particular debate within an even more specialized sub-disciplinary area, such scholarship seems distant from the actual concerns of the day. While this perhaps has always been somewhat true, the COVID pandemic has led to significant public questioning of the value of writing for academic journals and producing academic monographs. During the most difficult periods of the pandemic, Twitter and Facebook featured endless posts of individuals who have “put scholarship on the back burner” to focus on other public work, mental health, or to simply get through each day with their own or their family’s needs during such difficult times. It is, then, an odd experience to be editing a special issue on pedagogies and partnerships focused on addressing the COVID pandemic. Certainly, there have been points where, even as we labored on this journal, we wondered if time could not be better spent elsewhere, off the page.

As the emergency of the spring 2020 semester ended and the uncertainty of the summer began, we commiserated—in text messages, on Zoom calls, and sitting many feet apart in each other’s yards—about our feelings of disconnection and our inability to focus on anything other than the pandemic. The scholarship we had started before the pandemic hit seemed far less urgent in light of COVID. Instead of forcing ourselves to ignore the pandemic in our work and forge on with our existing projects, we decided to use our academic energies to face the crisis directly. Working from our expertise in reflective writing (Lesley) and public memory (Laura), we designed the Iowa State University Quarantine Journal Project (hereafter QJP).

After a period being away from our time editing Reflections, we were pleased to step in to fill the gap between the end of Deborah Mutnick and Laurie Grobman’s editorship and the beginning of Laura Gonzales’ term. It soon became apparent that under Deborah and Laurie’s leadership, Reflections had extended its scholarly profile, expanding categories of academic writing and readership. Laura will be in an enviable situation when her term begins in 2022.

Review of Counterstory: The Rhetoric and Writing of Critical Race Theory by Aja Y Martinez.

Since 2016, we have borne witness to an authoritarian leader who has wielded words to shape our national consciousness about people of color, women, immigrants, and disabled people in ways that have ignited the extreme right, resulting in a rise in hate crimes, the loss of protections for LGBTQ+ people, and, harrowingly, the indefinite detention and separation of immigrant children from their families. On January 6, just two weeks before the inauguration of President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. and Vice President Kamala Harris, the vitriol of the past four years catalyzed an insurrection by Trump supporters, encouraged by Donald Trump himself, in which U.S. Capitol police were violently attacked and killed and lawmakers were chased and called to be hanged. Emboldened by their indignation and their immutable belief that Joe Biden’s win was the result of widespread voter fraud, the insurrectionists, mostly white people, many with ties to white supremacist groups, armed themselves with Trump’s combative rhetoric to launch a physical attack on our democracy.

Located in Austin, TX, Latinitas describes itself as one of the only bilingual tech organizations in the U.S. and prides itself for creating the first digital magazine made for and by Latina youth. In 2002, Latinitas was developed as a project by a group of undergraduate students in a Latinos in Media course at the University of Texas at Austin.  Founders of Latinitas saw a need for more representation and stories by Latinas. Prior to the organization receiving its non-profit status, the organization ran as a student-led group. Since 2003, the organization has grown and adapted to the needs of the community and has provided an assortment of writing, leadership, tech, STEM, and college preparation workshops for Latina youth in middle school and high school. Through these workshops and the online magazine, “Latinas discover their voice and develop media skills while building a solid foundation for their future” (Donelly 2017). In addition to serving 3,000 girls annually through a variety of workshops, their online magazine continues to be a key tool for sharing multimedia content that represent the evolving digital landscape and what it means to be a Latina[1]. The work by the magazine’s editors and writers support and circulate the organizational identity[2] of Latinitas. In this article, we focus on how Latinitas, as a Latinx[3] organization, challenges the deficit perspective of Latina youth while trying to keep up with a changing digital landscape.

Review of Counterstory: The Rhetoric and Writing of Critical Race Theory by Aja Y Martinez.

View On Being an Activist in your Hometown (mp4) online via Google Drive. See PDF for transcript.

Review of From Thought to Action: Developing a Social Justice Orientation by Amy Aldridge Sanford.

Review of Counterstory: The Rhetoric and Writing of Critical Race Theory by Aja Y Martinez.

We attempt to deliver our vision; a vision that depicts how theories by Gloria E. Anzaldúa can offer us ways to help people of color (whom we identified as broken under current political rhetoric) to learn, discover, understand, or solve problems that can lead toward healing. We argue Anzaldúa’s theories and her Coyolxauhqui imperative, that ongoing process of making and unmaking, can serve to aid individuals with the greater public good of healing trauma—trauma that has been historically inscribed onto what we recognize as those bodies broken by systematic oppression. So, interwoven throughout this article, we highlight a variety of south Texas community members in an effort to connect with the communities we serve as educators. We feel that the work these individuals do as artists, writers, and activists connects well with Anzaldúa’s theories and her Coyolxauhqui imperative.

This essay was composed on the historic territories of the Akokisa/Orcoquisa and Karankawa peoples. In 2016, a Bloomberg poll revealed that what bothered voters most about then-presidential candidate Donald Trump was his mocking of disabled journalist Serge Kovaleski during a campaign rally in South Carolina. The previous November, Trump had ridiculed Kovaleski, who has arthrogryposis, a condition that affects the joints. Footage of the act soon dominated the news cycle, and the Clinton campaign stressed the cruelty of Trump’s caricature to distinguish between the two candidates. Trump’s campaign had already been characterized by racism, sexism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia, but it was his ableism that—ostensibly—threatened to derail his run. Memes circulated on social media advanced sentiments like, “As long as I live I’ll never understand how it didn’t end here. #ImpeachTrump” (Lloyd, 2017).

Who is an activist? What actions define a scholar-activist, an artist-activist, or community activist? How do community members, as non-academics, serve their community as advocates as well as intellectuals? And, finally, what is the impact that scholars and advocates make when they join with one another for social justice efforts within their respective communities? These are the questions that guided the work we present in this special issue of Reflections. This special issue will underscore how activism can work with academic life in the fight for social justice and change, so we invite you to take a closer look at activism and academia in community work.

In the midst of contemporary struggles to fight back against challenges to abortion rights, other important areas of reproductive justice work can be elided. One such area concerns Crisis Pregnancy Centers (CPCs), which are non-profit (often religious) organizations that offer services like parenting classes, religious counseling, and material goods for newborns (i.e. diapers or formula), but many CPCs also present themselves as if they are comprehensive reproductive health clinics that offer abortion services. In Hartford, the four of us have been part of a larger coalition working to curb deceptive advertising practices at CPCs, and this article outlines both why CPCs are a central reproductive justice issue and how we have addressed them in our community. We argue that tactical, flexible coalitions that prioritize lived experiences of community members are key for making rhetorical interventions that advance reproductive justice. Thus, we present multiple perspectives of reproductive health partnerships—community partner (Erica), faculty (Megan), and student (Eleanor and Sam)—to analyze the role of public storytelling in coalitional activism focused on regulating crisis pregnancy centers.

“Yeah, so yelling at the nurse very clearly does not make this right. She’s just a messenger. There is a way to be diplomatic about it. I like to play the dumb part a lot: ‘You know, I really don’t understand… could you clarify this for me?’ That used to work a lot better as a workaround.” —Emily “Sometimes it’s more talking to myself and talking to the client, like telling them what I see is going on because I guess in that case, my hope is that the provider is hearing it and even if they are not responding, that they are aware that I see what’s going on, and I’m making my client aware of what’s going on. …I know they hear me: the provider can hear me, and the nurses can hear me.” —Margaret “My client is completely bewildered, she is in pain. So me in that moment, I just put my hand on the nurse’s hand that had her breast, and said, ‘could you please not do that?’ And that’s all I said in that moment. And the nurse, she looks at me and she rolls her eyes, but she let go, which is what was important to my client. Afterwards my client said, ‘thank you for that.’” —Malika

Front matter for Reflections Volume 20, Issue 2, Fall/Winter 2020 issue.

Discriminatory policy structures related to segregation, criminalization, environmental regulation, and loan financing intersect to create severe racial inequities in reproductive health. These structures, and their material consequences for human lives, are constituted and perpetuated through discourse. Dominant narratives (DNs) provide stories that naturalize inequalities and are repeated until they become “common sense” by cultural members. The Reproductive Justice Movement (RJM) was founded by women of color activists and scholars to change oppressive structures and to promote the reproductive and human rights of all people. RJM activists have used personal stories as a resistive tool, recognizing that resistive stories can destabilize the taken-for-granted nature of DNs and the violent structures they uphold. In this article, we perform a Critical Narrative Analysis of three personal stories shared by reproductive healthcare providers to understand how their stories can perpetuate and/or resist oppressive DNs through their construction of marginalized patients as characters. We found that, in constructing narratives of patients, participants relied on three main DNs: Western Modernity, White Supremacy, and Neoliberalism. Drawing on these DNs, providers characterize patients as: Good or Bad (M)others, Victims, and Adversaries. Our goal is to show that narratives created with providers are political texts that constitute understandings of patients’ reproductive lives. We conclude with a re-telling of one narrative to emphasize the goals of reproductive justice and highlight the importance of re-framing the inequitable present in order to imagine equitable futures.

A school security guard stops a visibly pregnant young woman leaving school grounds to ask, “Do you even know who the father is?” A fellow shopper steps in front of a young mother’s grocery cart to point out, “Well, your life is over before it has even really begun isn’t it?” An Uber driver turns around to inform his passenger, “You look too young to be having a baby! What are you going to do?”

In this toolkit we offer tools and guidance for critically analyzing notions of Motherhood in order to promote reproductive justice. As champions of reproductive justice we are committed to doing the work of recognizing and undoing the inevitably oppressive ways we and those around us have been encultured into making sense of “Motherhood.” This work includes engaging in critical analysis of how those who hold authority in such constructions, such as healthcare providers, may implement more racially just conceptualizations of motherhood. We developed the methodology described below through extensive research on narrative analysis and through our e orts to make sense of our interviews with reproductive healthcare providers (HCPs) who spoke about the intersections of race, policy, and health.

Looking for ways to spread the information provided in this Toolkit? Let’s take it to Twitter. Below is a tweet for every article featured in this issue of Reflections.

Inforgraphic about the human right to maintain personal control over our bodies, life decisions, sexuality, gender identity, and the choice to reproduce.

In a sociopolitical context that continues to constrain reproductive agency, many organizations, media, and people construct pregnant or mothering teenagers as “things that are other than it should be” and many young mothers report being talked to as if they were a defect that must be addressed. People who experience dominant discourses of “teenage pregnancy prevention” are prompted to immediately respond to the rhetorical exigence of pregnant and parenting teen bodies. When visibly young pregnant or parenting people venture into public, they face an unpredictable and potentially hostile rhetorical arena. In this article, I reflect on a community-based workshop I facilitated in Boston from 2015-2019 at an annual one-day event for young parents called the Summit for Teen Empowerment and Parenting Success. Drawing on feminist rhetorical theories of interruption tactics, this workshop prepares young pregnant and parenting people with researched information and scripted responses they can use to interrupt and transform everyday moments in public places when strangers read their bodies as problems to criticize or loudly bemoan. However, findings from the surveys circulated at the 2019 workshop indicate that what participants value most about this experience is the opportunity to share and relate to one another’s experiences of reproductive injustice. This article offers feminist rhetoricians, community literacy scholars, and other scholar-activists an approach to sharing research findings and facilitating discussion in a useful way with those who embody exigences of reproductive justice.

This article presents a narrative about community-engaged research, promotores de salud (health promoters), reproductive justice, and confianza. Confianza is often translated as trust or con dence, but this piece discusses the dynamic ways that it can function beyond the literal translation in research and community education. The co-authors discuss how they developed relationships with each other, community members, and the promotores de salud who work with Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin (PPWI). This piece also describes how the PPWI promotores program began with a focus on community interests and how reproductive justice became a central part of its curriculum. Ultimately, we argue that confianza is an integral component to reproductive justice research, and as such, we encourage researchers to consider the role of confianzain their own work when pursuing community-engaged partnerships.

In the midst of contemporary struggles to fight back against challenges to abortion rights, other important areas of reproductive justice work can be elided. One such issue area is Crisis Pregnancy Centers (CPCs), which are non-pro t (often religious) organizations that o er services like parenting classes, religious counseling, and material goods for newborns (i.e. diapers or formula), but many CPCs also present themselves as if they are comprehensive reproductive health clinics that o er abortion services. In Hartford, the four of us have been part of a larger coalition working to curb deceptive advertising practices at CPCs, and this article outlines both why CPCs are a central reproductive justice issue and how we have addressed them in our community. We argue that tactical, flexible coalitions that prioritize lived experiences of community members are key for making rhetorical interventions that advance reproductive justice. Thus, we present multiple perspectives of reproductive health partnerships—community partner (Erica), faculty (Megan), and student (Eleanor and Sam)—to analyze the role of public storytelling in coalitional activism focused on regulating crisis pregnancy centers.

More often than not, coming to the end of things is bittersweet. As we look back on our three years co-editing Reflections, we are proud of the issues we published, the authors we came to know, the amazing editorial and production team we assembled, and the effort we put into developing a set of tangible guidelines to pass along to our successor(s).