Cross-institutional research of pedagogy in the technical and professional communication classroom is needed to understand social justice teaching across multiple contexts. This collective case study discusses social justice-focused assignments given by eight instructors at different institutions. Results show that institutions with more diverse populations may have advantages in making social justice power differentials salient. Further, teacher positionality impacts the degree of social justice content incorporated.

As digital technologies rapidly evolve, updating and enhancing models of digital literacy pedagogy in technical and professional communication (TPC) becomes more urgent. In this article, we use "digital life" to conceptualize the ever-changing ways of knowing and being in postinternet society. Using collaborative autoethnography, we investigate features of threshold concepts in TPC pedagogy that may support models of digital literacy that are resistant to tools-based definitions, foster student agency, and facilitate accessibility, equity, and justice.

Although the field of illustration is a major topic in technical and professional communication (TPC), social justice regarding medical illustrations is yet to be investigated. Drawing from an analysis of TPC journals, program websites, textbooks, and syllabi, this study explores how TPC could advance a social justice view on medical illustration, especially in the textbooks that we use in teaching medical and science writing courses. Not only did we find that very few medical and science writing textbooks included illustrations, but a significant number of illustrations were white. We suggest intentionality in the choice of pedagogical materials, overt discussion of social justice in the curriculum, and critical borrowing of pedagogical materials.

This article examines the patient perspective as an emerging feature of medical case report writing, and through analysis of technical reporting guidelines and a corpus of published reports, shows how the biomedical community incorporates patient-authored perspectives into processes of research and publication. The author concludes by discussing the value and complexities of patient inclusion efforts and the potential for scholars of rhetoric and technical communication to take part in shaping those efforts.

ABSTRACTThis project investigates how the goals of microenterprise entrepreneurs affect their use of communication genres. Although slide-based business pitches are key for traditional entrepreneurs, microenterprise entrepreneurs have little interest in investment. Therefore, acquiring customers through short elevator pitches takes this central position. This article also explores the social justice dimensions of microenterprise acceleration, finding that such organizations can provide important services in combating inequality. This project uses writing, activity, and genre research as a theoretical framework, and the research site is a microenterprise accelerator in Tacoma, Washington called Spaceworks Tacoma, which supports both lower-income and Black owners of small businesses.KEYWORDS: Workplace studiesprofessional practice, social justiceethicsentrepreneurshipWriting, activity, and genre research (WAGR)microenterprises AcknowledgementsFirst, I would like to thank the entrepreneurs and the director of Spaceworks who very graciously gave me their time to talk about their organizations. I would also like to thank my dissertation committee, Richard Johnson-Sheehan, Jennifer Bay, Bradley Dilger, and Clay Spinuzzi who provided guidance on both the research process and the writing and revising of the manuscript. And finally, I would like to thank Rebecca Walton and this article's anonymous reviewers, who helped me to strengthen and sharpen the article.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationFundingThis project was not supported by any funding.Notes on contributorsMason T. PellegriniMason Pellegrini is an assistant professor in technical communication and rhetoric at Texas Tech University. His main research areas are entrepreneurial communication, workplace writing, academic publishing, and qualitative research methods. In 2022, Mason received a Fulbright Open Research Grant to Chile, which he used to study entrepreneurship communication at the famous Chilean business accelerator Start-Up Chile.

ABSTRACTAs immersive technology grows in popularity, universities are developing academic innovation labs (AIL) that often introduce students to virtual reality (VR) and other emerging cross reality applications. Although these labs help educate students on emerging technology, a more critical eye is needed to examine user experience (UX). This article reports on a qualitative, multimethod study that employed a talk-aloud UX protocol to gather data on VR users' experience at the University of Connecticut's OPIM Research Lab. To fully define and contrast this data, we juxtapose these individual narratives with rhetorical analysis of marketing discourse, as presented by VR platform HTC Vive, Google's VR application Tilt Brush, and the Research Lab's promotional material. Based on our findings, we assert that sociotechnical imaginaries as constructed by promotional material often reduce the complexities of immersion in user experience. Such marketing rhetoric creates "top-down" imaginaries that contrast with "bottom-up" imaginaries generated in user experience, reinforcing the complex and fluid definitions of immersion. The resulting study has practical implications for stakeholders across higher education, especially in the context of innovation labs, as well as for technical and professional communication educators and practitioners.KEYWORDS: Immersive technologyinnovation labsvirtual realityimmersionuser experienceemerging technologyfuture imaginariessociotechnical imaginaries Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationNotes on contributorsBrent LuciaBrent Lucia is an Assistant Professor In-Residence at the University of Connecticut School of Business. He has a PhD in Composition and Applied Linguistics from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. His current research explores the rhetorics of technology and its relationship to the production of space. His recent scholarship can be found in Rhetoric Review, Business and Professional Communication Quarterly, and Enculturation.Matthew A. VetterMatthew A. Vetter is an Associate Professor of English and affiliate faculty in the Composition and Applied Linguistics PhD program at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. His research, which asks questions related to technology, rhetoric, and writing, has been published widely in venues such as Social Media and Society, Rhetoric Review, Studies in Higher Education, and Computers and Composition. His co-authored book, Wikipedia and the Representation of Reality, was published by Routledge in 2021.David A. SolbergDavid A. Solberg is a teaching assistant at the Holy Family Institute in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He received his MA degree in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. His master's thesis was entitled The Use of Parallelism in Poetry Writing for the Acquisition of English Grammar (available from ProQuest).

ABSTRACTWe asked 15 editors about their perceptions of five sentences using singular they in different contexts and about the style guides that inform their work. Editors appreciated the inclusivity of indefinite and definite singular they and recognized APA for its leading-edge stance. Our findings indicate the need for editors to develop a heuristic for determining when to deviate from style guide advice and to develop their own system for mitigating ambiguity in relation to they.KEYWORDS: Editingsocial justice / ethics Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.Notes1. We explained to editors that, in each sentence, the capitalized pronoun referred to the capitalized noun phrase.2. When we refer to a "comprehensive style guide," we mean a manual that provides standards for writing, editing, and publishing texts. A comprehensive style guide may be written by a publisher or discourse community but adopted widely. For example, University of Chicago Press's Chicago Manual of Style is used by other publishers and the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association is used in disciplines outside of psychology.Companies may create their own style guides for internal use. Such guides may or may not be as detailed or complete as comprehensive style guides and may, in fact, be based on or direct users to a comprehensive style guide for any gaps in content. For example, ACES: The Society for Editing "Style Guide and Proofreading Checklist" (Filippini, Citation2021) is for ACES communications and based on the AP Stylebook.Some editors in this study referred to style sheets. A copyeditor creates and uses a style sheet to note a running list of grammar and usage that are specific to a manuscript and which may be different from house style or a comprehensive style guide (CMOS, Section 2.55).Despite attempting to define these terms, we recognize there are overlaps among the categories and across fields. For example, the Microsoft Writing Style Guide began as an in-house style guide and is now used by other software companies. Further, there exist other contexts of the terms "style guide" and "style sheet," such as brand style guides, programming style guides, and web design style sheets.3. Of the remaining two editors, one said that they would revise the sentence to avoid using singular they, and the other said that they would use the name Pat again instead of a pronoun.4. Only three editors (4%) said they would edit the sentence.5. The two remaining editors differed in their responses. One said that they would avoid using singular they by revising the sentence; the other said that they would change the pronoun to her.6. Ten editors said that they would edit this sentence.7. As of August 16, 2022, AP Stylebook Online advice under "accent marks" reads: "Use accent marks or other diacritical marks with names of people who request them or are widely known to use them, or if quoting directly in a language that uses them: An officer spotted him and asked a question: "Cómo estás?" How are you? Otherwise, do not use these marks in English-language stories. Note: Many AP customers' computer systems ingest via the ANPA standard and will not receive diacritical marks published by the AP."Additional informationNotes on contributorsJo MackiewiczJo Mackiewicz is a professor of rhetoric and professional communication at Iowa State University. She studies the communication of pedagogical and workplace interactions. Her book, Welding Technical Communication: Teaching and Learning Embodied Knowledge was published by SUNY Press in 2022.Shaya KrautShaya Kraut is a PhD student in the Rhetoric and Professional Communication program at Iowa State University, where she teaches first-year writing. She has also worked as an ESL teacher, a writing center tutor, and a teacher/tutor for adult basic education. Her research interests include composition pedagogy and critical literacy.Allison DurazziAllison Durazzi is a communication professional with experience in industry settings including law, the arts, and freelance editing. She is a Ph.D. student in Rhetoric and Professional Communication at Iowa State University where she researches and teaches technical editing and teaches business, technical, and speech communication courses.

This article focuses on a professional space that technical and professional communication with which students might not be familiar: a factory. In unionized factory workplaces, particularly, the interactions between the factory floor workers (the unionized group) and the salaried professionals can be complicated, making effective communication difficult. From the perspective of one factory floor worker, we examine some of these complications and difficulties as a way to provide insight into such workspaces.

This special issue questions current notions and practices of "professionalism" in TPC. Professionalism – whether an identity, a status, or a set of behaviors or conventions – continues to be constructed in white supremacist, ableist, heteronormative, and classist frameworks. The authors in this issue work to reimagine what professionalism means in our classrooms, workplaces, and communities by critiquing the professional practices that uphold oppressive and exploitative structures, inspiring just action and new futures.

Black mentorship is key to the professional development of Black scholars in technical and professional communication (TPC) and writing studies. Blending narrative ethnography and grounded theory, this article extends existing investigations into mentorship among Black professionals, by exploring how mentorship and rhetorical kinship among Black TPC and writing professors enrich their professional development. With implications for both academia and industry, this article highlights how Black TPC scholars develop, negotiate, and sustain Black professional ethos.

Through an auto-ethnographic critical reflection methodology, this article describes our attempts to use course documents as tactical tools of resistance within undergraduate professional writing courses. Using introspection to examine how our positionalities and values shape the choices we make when constructing course documents, we advocate for scholars and practitioners of rhetoric and technical communication to engage in a sustained practice of critical reflection as part of developing inclusive and equitable pedagogy and classroom coalition building.

This study extends the retrospective analysis of entries for the CCCC Outstanding Dissertation Award in Technical Communication (1999–2003) by Stuart Selber in 2004, focusing on the subsequent two decades (2004 to 2022), to identify the topical research areas and methodologies in technical and professional communication (TPC) via the winning entries of the award. Through descriptive content analysis of 29 dissertations and corresponding summary statistics, this study reports on TPC disciplinary emphases and growth based on the sponsoring institutions on these dissertations, featured topics and their research methods or methodologies, and projected implications for the field. Accordingly, this study reveals the state of TPC graduate research through the lens of the imminent award and what it means for doctoral researchers, their advisors, and programs.

Joining the growing scholarly conversation on food rhetorics and technical and professional communication (TPC), this rhetorical analysis addresses two themes that arise in a Jell-O booklet (circa 1913): 1) constructing white femininity through women’s frustration and technical failure related to cooking and 2) asserting the Black mammy stereotype as a mechanism of maintaining white supremacy. Such analysis illustrates how food-related artifacts construct ideologies as they simultaneously offer technical instruction.

The COVID-19 pandemic made nearly every teacher and student online teachers and students in some capacity. This article presents a case study of an experienced, contingent technical and professional communication (TPC) instructor showing how she sets up, presents, and, most importantly, labors in her course for the benefit of her students and herself. This article ends with recommendations for other online TPC teachers and program administrators to support online TPC courses.

ABSTRACTProblem-solving is central to technical and professional communication (TPC), but problem-solving's economic roots may not align with social justice. This article introduces socially just creativity: the ability to generate new or unique and effective ideas in conjunction with other members of a community to challenge unjust status quos and tackle wicked social justice problems. The article uses a case study to illustrate that conception. It concludes with recommendations for TPC practitioners to enact social justice creativity.KEYWORDS: Creativityproblem-solvingsocial justicetechnical and professional communication AcknowledgementsThank you to Sylvi for deploying creativity toward social justice and for sharing your story with me. Thank you to Dr. Erin Brock Carlson, Dr. Lynne Stahl, and Dr. Heather Noel Turner for prompting me to think more deeply about the relationship between problem-solving and efficiency (Erin), Uber's complex application of creativity (Lynne), and the relationship between DEI initiatives and social justice (Heather).Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.Additional informationNotes on contributorsKrista Speicher SarrafKrista Speicher Sarraf is an Assistant Professor of Technical and Professional Communication at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, California, where she directs the Technical and Professional Communication Program. Her research draws on the interdisciplinary field of creativity studies to explore how technical and professional communicator use creative thinking to address wicked problems.

This article offers perspectives on adopting smart home technology into usability testing for technical and professional communication (TPC) courses. Usability is a valued skill for technical communicators. However, usability testing methods have their problems as pedagogical tools. Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices and Smart Home Technology (SHT) may offer instructors tools to overcome some of those problems. This article details advantages and concerns associated with using SHT for curricular usability testing.

I propose Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) as an approach for understanding the discursive and material implications of technical documents in distant sites. I provide a historical vignette of MCDA and exemplify how technical and professional communication (TPC) researchers can critically engage with distant sites through MCDA by analyzing materials about GhanaPostGPS, a geolocation technology. I conclude by discussing limitations of MCDA – access to archives – and propose the creation of crowdsourced technical documentation archives.

As a field committed to solving problems, technical and professional communication (TPC) seems well positioned to engage the challenges that come with social justice work intellectually and respond with practical solutions. In this article, the authors argue that power and legitimacy are critical terms that can propel our social justice work, if we can recast them in our disciplinary history and ultimately renegotiate them in the trajectories of our disciplinary futures.

This study investigates how instructional design manifests in TPC pedagogies and where educators draw resources from. As TPC expands into areas in which instructional design traditionally governs, scholars need to discern how TPC distinguishes its specialty while providing training to support instructional design practices. Through textbook and syllabus analysis, coupled with instructor interviews, this study reports findings about instructional design pedagogy within TPC based on the themes gathered from the instructors’ experiences and existing resources.

Building from a recent history of how technical and professional communication has addressed risk, we argue that the spatial and temporal frames through which the field has encountered risk must be confronted in working toward climate justice. We offer topoi that can be deployed to trace these interconnections and apply them to The Law of the River in the Colorado River Basin to illustrate how case studies can demonstrate the unequal distribution of climate risk.

This article offers infrastructural storytelling as a methodological approach attuned to the emplaced dynamics of digital infrastructure. Countering the clean progress narratives of sustainability reports in the technology sector, this approach follows digital infrastructure to two locations: San Francisco, California (Google) and Toronto, Ontario (Digital Realty). Infrastructural storytelling explicates how physical infrastructures produce uneven social, political, and economic realities by investing in some ways of life over others.

This article reports on an interview-based study with COVID-19 vaccine trial participants (n = 40) and addresses three strategies participants used to localize vaccine communication for their communities: (1) presenting embodied evidence, (2) demystifying clinical research, (3) operationalizing relationships. These strategies contribute to understandings of embodiment, relationships, and localization in technical and professional communication (TPC). They also show how participants used TPC to resist dominant individualist approaches to health and to practice collective care.

This Methodologies and Approaches piece interfaces conversations about social justice pedagogies in technical and professional communication (TPC), Black TPC, and online TPC instruction to discuss the social justice affordances of Slack in online instruction. Drawing on our experiences using Slack within an online graduate course during the COVID-19 pandemic, we consider how Slack supports pedagogical community building and accessibility in online instruction before presenting a framework for assessing instructional technologies in terms of social justice.

While entrepreneurship is a pervasive cultural concept, it is not universally applicable. Drawing on a year-long study with nonprofit workers, this piece articulates a frame for understanding technical and professional communication work within nonprofits rooted in comradeship, which privileges community needs, everyday people, listening, and solidarity across stakeholder groups. Such a frame offers a more nuanced understanding of how accountability frames the work of nonprofit employees and other stakeholders dedicated to social justice.

To support collaborations between technical communicators and nonprofits, this article outlines a framework for composing public events. The article develops a technical and professional communication (TPC) lens for public events and then draws that together with a case study of a nonprofit’s strategies for their public event. Through this work, the article outlines a framework for organizing and managing public events that can engage challenging publics around complex information.

This article reports on a study of 65 randomly sampled medical crowdfunding campaigns and five interviews with campaign authors. We found that authors innovated technical and professional communication (TPC) tools to narrate their illness experiences, coordinate digital audiences, and compel action. Thus, these authors practice TPC as care seeking and caregiving. Crowdfunding platforms, however, situate authors to individualize structural problems in ways that preempt collective action. We conclude with pedagogical implications of our findings.

This article offers a theoretical intervention into the work on posthumanism in technical and professional communication (TPC), an intervention that encourages the field to recognize relationships between objects and users in different ways. Our intervention draws on the work of Deleuze and Guattari to reimagine how TPC tends to think about the concept of assemblage. We apply this other view in makerspaces, illustrating what it buys us for practice and theory in complex sociotechnical contexts.

Identifying the effects of online templates, such as empty state pages (ESPs), sheds light on the user writing habits and best practices for user design. By using assemblage theory and extending previous studies of ESPs to grant proposal writing on the crowded-funded website Experiment.com, this large-scale study (n = 778) finds that required fields are more likely to be filled to the character limit than optional fields.

This article describes students’ emotional intelligence (EI) development when participating in the Trans-Atlantic and Pacific Project (TAPP) in two technical and professional communication (TPC) courses. The researchers used modified grounded theory to compile the emotions used for coding students’ weekly reflections, and content analyzed how the TAPP experience affected students’ EI development. Overall, the article emphasizes the importance of supporting TPC students’ EI development in low-stakes environments since EI directly impacted their actions when collaborating.

ABSTRACTThis article builds four composite characters from the international Zika response to demonstrate each role’s position relative to inclusive health communication. I argue that a lack of jurisdictional stasis is at play in decision-making practices about transnational risk communication approaches. During emergency health responses, this lack of jurisdictional stasis functions to maintain the status quo in order for stakeholders to leverage their power in prioritizing local deliberations in transnational public health discourse and decision making.KEYWORDS: Transnationalstasishealth communicationcommunity engagement Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1. In keeping with norms of global health discourse and of the context of this study, I preserve the gendered language used by the organizations throughout this manuscript that refers to women and girls. Terms such as “women of reproductive age” are consistent with the WHO and were used nearly exclusively to refer to people with uteruses who could be affected by Zika in utero or by giving birth to a child with congenital Zika syndrome. This term also reflects the history of gender-based violence that has predominantly affected people assigned female at birth. That said, the author acknowledges that this language can be harmful and reductive, particularly because transgender and non-binary people with uteruses are reproductive agents and that people who identify as women of reproductive age may not be able or choose to reproduce.2. More recently, the global health discourse community has dropped “communication” from the disciplinary title to account for the various way that behavior change interventions can be broader than what’s traditionally considered “communication.”3. Often, in my experience, these issues were tabled for pandemic preparedness discussions or for “lessons learned” documents meant to support future outbreak responses.4. All names of individuals and organizations in the narrative composites are fictional.5. Here, I reference Galison’s (Citation1997) trading zone, referred to by Wilson and Herndl (Citation2007) in their argument that a knowledge map created a boundary object to facilitate understanding of how knowledge from different areas within the interdisciplinary group that they were working with created a zone through which knowledge important to disparate parties about a shared area of concern could pass.6. For more on empowerment, refer to chapter 4 of Dingo’s (Citation2012) Networking ArgumentsAdditional informationNotes on contributorsJulie GerdesJulie Gerdes is an assistant professor of technical and professional writing and rhetoric at Virginia Tech. She works at the intersection of technical communication and global public health. Her interdisciplinary research examines methodologies for understanding and implementing inclusive risk communication, particularly during public health emergencies.

Technical and professional communication (TPC) frequently analyzes its own research. Although conferences like Association of Teachers of Technical Writing (ATTW) are scholarly forums, most work presented is not included in disciplinary analyses or reviews. To articulate a baseline, this article conducts a corpus-based content analysis of the titles and abstracts presented at ATTW or published in Technical Communication Quarterly (TCQ) between 1998 and 2018. The common and key words suggest topic areas and rhetorical features.

This study investigates the rhetorics of smart cities and how they define citizens’ agency. We consider the framing of human control against automated technological infrastructures in smart and playable cities. Through examining selected smart city plans from the U.S., Europe, and Asia, we share results from the comparisons of these plans to draw implications for technical and professional communication (TPC) practices and pedagogy. We propose a postconnectivist trajectory for TPC toward the increasingly datafied future.

This article asserts that auditory cues can be categorized by rhetorical function into the categories of visual rhetoric, defined by Amare and Manning under Peirce’s Ten Classes of Sign, understanding visual rhetoric to include both images and text. This article expands this definition to aural-visual rhetoric, including auditory elements as visual rhetoric to analyze multimodal Technical and Professional Communication (TPC), demonstrating this method using the opening tutorial scene from Portal 2.

Black Technical and Professional Communication is defined as ”practices that are centered around Black community, culture, and rhetorical practices that are inherent in the Black lived experience. Black TPC is reflective of the cultural, economic, social, and political experiences of Black people across the Diaspora” (Black TPC Taskforce). This special issue emphasizes the importance of valuing Black TPC as fundamental to developing a comprehensive understanding of the technical and professional communication.

This article highlights technical and professional communication (TPC) as a literacy practice used to plan and sustain Black family reunions. Specifically, I examine the work of three families who create and engage with technical and business writing genres to complete internal and external reunion organizing work. I argue that the field of TPC needs more focused inquiry into research that centers Black families as TPC practitioners.

ABSTRACTThis article examines how 14 Black professional communicators publicly share their stories about their career change into software development and other positions in the tech industry. Findings suggest that Black readers looking to shift into the tech field benefit from emotional experiences with professional development resources as they make their strategic career pivots. Black technical joy describes this rhetorical practice to find comfort in and celebration of the strategic ways Black people approach technical communication.KEYWORDS: Computer science / programmingracial studies / ethnic studies / cultural studiesblack technical joyblack rhetoricqualitative methodsworkplace studies / professional practice AcknowledgmentsMany thanks to Christopher Castillo and Jason Tham for their comments on the first draft of my proposal to this special issue. Your disciplinary perspectives from literacy studies and technical and professional communication helped me understand how to ground my research within the expectations of Technical Communication Quarterly readers. Thank you anonymous peer reviewers for your sharp observations on how this article could strengthen its argument and highlight the most salient themes in my analysis. And thanks to the wonderful editors of this special issue for their mentorship and guiding revision.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1. Black professionals in this article represent the United States, the United Kingdom, Nigeria, and Kenya. I use Black to encompass these nationalities.2. Annamma, Jackson, and Morrison (Citation2016) argue that "color-blind racism" points out the problem of refusing to acknowledge race while associating disability with ignorance and passivity. They suggest that color-evasiveness "allows for both comprehensively situating the conceptualization and critique of color-blindness as well as thoughtfully considering how to move the underlying ideology forward expansively" (p. 158).3. For this study, I referred to McKee and Porter (Citation2008) and Quinton and Reynolds (Citation2018) for advice on the ethics of doing my Internet research study. Rather than determining if online content is private or public, "we need to think about the sensitivity of the subject we might be researching as well as the vulnerability of the research participants" (Quinton & Reynolds, Citation2018, p. 159) to decide if informed consent is required. University institutional review boards (IRB) may not have clear guidance on how to assess the ethics and harm of Internet research (My university determined my study was exempt from further review because I was not speaking directly to the authors.). In response to limited guidance or policy from IRB, scholars should make an empathetic, humanizing "probable judgment" (McKee & Porter, Citation2008, p. 725) and reflect if "it's reasonable to assume that [the authors] desire their content to be disseminated and also commented upon, which includes the analysis of their content as a data resource for research" (Quinton & Reynolds, Citation2018, p. 159).4. Agile is an incremental and iterative collaborative approach to project management that emphasizes teams' quickly delivering versions of a product or service to clients in a two-week sprint to receive feedback. Teams can then implement desired changes to the product or service in another two-week sprint. This process of iterative discovery helps teams reduce risks and ensure the product adapts to new requirements. Agile was first developed in software development in 2001 and has since been implemented in other industries.Additional informationNotes on contributorsAntonio ByrdAntonio Byrd is an assistant professor of English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, where he teaches courses in professional and technical communication, multimodal composition, and Black/African American literacy. He uses qualitative research and critical race studies to understand how Black adults learn and use computer programming to address racial inequality in their communities. Byrd's work has previously appeared in College Composition and Communication and Literacy in Composition Studies. He is the recipient of the 2021 Richard Braddock Award for Best Research Article in the College Composition and Communication journal.

In a Spring 2020 Technical and Professional Communication (TPC) course on risk communication, we watched the COVID-19 pandemic unfold and discussed how technical communicators can foreground vulnerable and marginalized populations who are often excluded from official communication channels. The article below offers perspectives on tactical communication and/or coalition building during a pandemic, coining the term tactical risk communication (TRC) and examining how TRC functions in the face of a global health crisis.

Technical and professional communication (TPC) curricula tend to prioritize hyperpragmatist learning outcomes, objectives, and activities. Drawing on a grounded theory analysis of curricular self-assessment data, including interviews with community partners, we argue that TPC in the U.S. is at constant risk of co-option by market logics. Through a speculative curricular framework that works toward building more just, liveable worlds, this essay reimagines TPC curricula as an opportunity to redress inequities caused by exploitative market logics.