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.

This article introduces “superdiversity,” a concept from migration studies, as a framework for TPC practitioners and scholars defining migrant multilingual audiences. In contrast to intercultural understandings of audience, superdiversity better accounts for cultural complexity in diverse environments. The article uses an extended example to demonstrate how superdiversity operates as an intersectional and social justice-oriented praxis. The example of a nonprofit organization’s intake process illustrates how superdiversity helps this organization better define and understand its clients.

This article reports from a qualitative case study exploring how a team of agricultural scientists framed their nonscientific audiences for science communication. Our results indicate communication audiences and strategies were shaped by state extension systems. As a result, we argue that technical communicators can contribute to agricultural science communication teams by modeling rhetorically engaged communication and building capacity for audiences overlooked by extension models most focused on economic impact.

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 examines how nonprofessionals in early modern England used tactical technical communication and rhetorical strategies to build medical knowledge and healthcare expertise. Using a feminist ethos and tactical technical communication lens, this article details a content analysis study of 4,045 handwritten medical recipes from England dated between 1540 and 1860. Findings from the study extend tactical technical communication by examining non-digital/non-internet spaces and how extra-institutional nonprofessionals build ethos and expertise.

This article argues that through embodied presentations and the multimodal, international and intercultural affordances of YouTube, the rhetoric of Black hair care YouTubers is tactical TPC toward social justices. We note the interactive comments section as a place for technical communicators to identify and redress issues in normative instructional discourse. This scholarship extends TPC beyond “how to do it” and “how I do it” toward “how we must view it in order to do it.’

This article offers an approach to providing identity-specific routes for engagement in pro-Black futures in distributed ways. We outline a model designed for Black practitioners and non-Black practitioners in professional environments to navigate their complex relationships given the historical, cultural, and social nature of coalitional work. We demonstrate this model as a possible pathway for situated and distributed everyday coalitional work through reflective and introspective storytelling based on individual and shared positionality.

In the summer of 1881, a group of Black women formed The Washing Society of Atlanta by deploying extraorganizational technical communication to collectively bargain for better working conditions and wages. In this article, we illuminate the ways that Black women operated in a world dominated by an established order of racial hierarchy. We argue that the Washerwomen manifested a particular form of Black technical communication rooted in agency and advocacy.

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.

In visual risk communication, there has been a push toward using realism to show potential effects of sea level rise on coastal communities, often with the assumption that higher degrees of realism are more effective. We challenge this assumption by sharing the results of a user-based study exploring reactions to simulated images of flooded landmarks. The findings identify nuanced rhetorical and emotional responses, encouraging technical communicators to contribute to risk scholarship in psychology and cartography.

This paper theorizes historical marker texts (HMT) as succinct, public facing informational reports that reinforce white supremacy and minimize or erase the memory of Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) individuals. In this layered content and discourse analysis, I evaluate the demographics of the commissioners at the local and state level, the instructions for the HMT application, and the text of a selected group of HMTs.

Attention to the ethical dimension in technical and professional communication (TPC) is paramount, especially when dealing with new, emerging technologies. Such technologies frequently rest within corporate environments that may resist ethical gatekeeping. I suggest several methods by which TPC instructors can critically question the limits of corporate structure to show students that they have a variety of options for responding to assignments other than those their employers may offer them.

Through an ethnographic study conducted with an Indigenous language rights organization, this article illustrates how translation and interpretation can be further considered in global technical communication research. By providing examples of how Indigenous language translators and interpreters approach their work, this article advocates for a reframing of multilingualism in technical communication through a deliberate attunement to the relationships between language, land, and positionality. The author argues that as technical communicators continue conducting research in multilingual contexts, researchers should acknowledge how translation and interpretation impact the results and methodologies of contemporary global research.

This article argues that science fiction is a powerful tool for teaching ethics in the technical communication classroom. As a literary genre, science fiction is uniquely situated to critique the social and political consequences of technological progress and to guide future behaviors. Using a speculative fiction-themed technical communication seminar as a case study, this essay demonstrates how science fiction theory, narratives, and projects can encourage students to think more holistically about their future roles as scientists and communicators. Such an approach can reinvigorate traditional workplace genres, support responsible decision-making, and promote multiculturalism, environmentalism, and social justice.

The author proposes Policy, Roles, Sites (PRS), a conceptual model to help technical communicators analyze high-stakes, long-debated public policy issues and reveal ways that technical and professional communication informs public policy development and implementation. The author demonstrates how the PRS model can be used to examine complex public policy issues from race and policing to gun rights and gun control, as well as policy issues that intersect these seemingly disparate issues.

This Methodologies and Approaches piece argues artificially intelligent machine learning systems can be used to effectively advance justice-oriented research in technical and professional communication (TPC). Using a preexisting dataset investigating patient marginalization in pharmaceuticals policy discourse, we built and tested 49 machine learning systems designed to identify and track rhetorical features of interest. Three popular and one new approach to feature engineering (text quantification) were evaluated. The results indicate that these systems have great potential for use in TPC research.

Hewett and Bourelle (2019) have collected a series of essays aimed to help program administrators (PAs) develop and fine-tune online training and professional development programs in technical and ...

This article describes how one technical communication program succeeded in creating an independent department by separating from English. We describe the context that led to the decision to create an independent program and offer advice for others who might be interested in doing the same, emphasizing five key lessons that we learned during our process. We also offer some practical actions others might take if they seek to do something similar.

This article introduces the term “queer usability” to technical communicators. Queer usability is the anticipation of marginalized communities and the application of this anticipation to user-centered design to create a digital space in which marginalized populations are centered. In short, queer usability anticipates and centers marginalized users and their anticipated needs. To ethically create social media worlds, we must embrace and implement queer usability.

In this introduction, we emphasize the urgency of centering bodyminds and communities whose lives and experiences have been disregarded, or viewed as disposable, in medical and technical communication. With an expansive vision of health, we set the interdisciplinary stage for authors who answer the call of multiply-marginalized scholars working in (and beyond) medical rhetorics to reimagine health-related research that centers the perspectives, experiences, and embodied realities of multiply-marginalized communities (Jones, 2020; Walton, Moore, Jones 2019).

When an urban planning project is announced, local media outlets often focus on broadly describing the building or project. But how can we listen to and value the stories from people displaced by large-scale urban change? This article adopts a case-study approach to share complicated stories from four residents displaced by a redevelopment project and suggests technical communication approaches for productively placing stories from the displaced in dialogue with broader planning project stories.

This article introduces “rhetorical body work” as a framework for understanding professional embodiment in health provider education and technical and professional communication (TPC) pedagogy. Using the case study of clinical nursing simulations and drawing on sociological theory, I provide a detailed analysis of three components of rhetorical body work as they manifest in three simulation scenarios: physical, emotional, and discursive. I conclude by considering the implications of these findings for the embodied teaching of TPC.

This article provides an overview of robust social justice work already done in technical and professional communication (TPC) to introduce the transformative paradigm, an action research framework articulated by Donna Mertens. Research articles in TPC offer examples of the axiological, ontological, epistemological, and methodological tenets of the transformative paradigm. Together with a measured discussion of the paradigm, this Methodologies and Approaches article responds to calls in TPC scholarship to articulate and practice methodologies resonant with the social justice turn.

Ethics and Practice in Science Communication (2018) is a collection of works drawn from various conferences, symposia, and journals that explores the ethics of technical communication and the commu...

This paper studies the language of job descriptions in rhetoric and technical and professional communication to explore how this language might be exclusionary of international scholars. Through critical discourse analysis, we reviewed current U.S. labor and immigration laws and contrasted those laws with the language of hiring documents. We found that hiring documents do not always align with U.S. labor and immigration laws and consequently hinder the hiring prospects of international scholars.

This article examines how nineteenth-century participants in technical and professional communication (TPC) used rhetorical techniques of ridicule to critique audiences’ assumptions and advocate for expanded educational opportunities. Encouraging laughter ostensibly about college mathematics, Vassar students drew on their knowledge of rhetoric and higher education to disrupt audience expectations regarding the gendered identities of mathematician and college student. Using a case study, this article broadly urges the development of the role of humor as a technique in TPC.

ABSTRACT This article examines pedagogical results from an IRB-approved study that used the Omeka platform in two sections of technical writing classes. The research question explored how a digital humanities (DH) project can be an opportunity for students to learn concepts and take ownership of publicly facing content. The method used is qualitative, and findings indicated that students embraced an open-source and collaborative project. Results also demonstrated how technical and professional communication (TPC) instructors might find DH tools well suited to TPC competencies.

ABSTRACT This article uses an apparent feminist approach to engage a two-part research question: First, does gender affect the frequency with which people become subjects of medical digital imaging? Second, how do the subjects of medical digital imaging become persuaded to accept this role? Engaging with medical imaging and the technical communication surrounding it as an assemblage of technical rhetorics (Frost & Eble) and thus a technology, this project shows that women are more commonly scanned as a result of social biases. Further, this article argues that the ubiquity of scanning of women’s bodies has implications for political agency and privacy and for technical communicators’ understandings of efficiency. This study is preliminary but presents compelling evidence that further research on the technical communication surrounding gender and medical imaging is necessary.

ABSTRACT “Exclusive Pumping” straddles the most common infant-feeding methods: breastfeeding and bottle feeding. Exclusive pumpers express milk and feed with bottles. Yet experts rarely recommend exclusive pumping, creating a need for information outside of formal communication outlets. This article argues that exclusive pumping forums are sites of tactical technical communication – operating as “anti-institutional” – and explores these forums as places of inspiration and support, as well as spaces where mothers seek to solve technical feeding problems while avoiding institutional judgment.

This article responds to recent calls for social justice-oriented work in Technical and professional communication, detailing moments from a participatory photovoice project with community organizers working toward a more just regional economy. By juxtaposing participatory action research methods and the rhetorical concept of metis, or embodied, rhetorical cunning, this article highlights how reversals of power might transform research projects for all parties involved; and how disenfranchised groups might challenge extractive practices draining their communities.

Technical communicators can manage the content users share in online communities, but this is only feasible if the users act like a community with a shared understanding of what the software does. When they do not, users discuss technologies as unsettled objects and rely on technical communication to socially construct them. This research describes such uses of technical communication and argues how professional technical communicators can help.

Informed by the social justice turn, this article highlights the often-overlooked voices and experiences of women working in technical and professional communication in the Global South, specifically in India. Using an apparent feminist frame, this article highlights the networked identities and forces of power at play that can marginalize Indian practitioners in globalized workplaces. Further, it seeks to understand the ways Indian women exercise and establish professional legitimacy by utilizing apparently feminist tactics.

This special issue of Technical Communication Quarterly engages comics, graphic storytelling, and creative methods of research and production in technical communication. The guest editors briefly overview intersections between comics and technical communication, then introduce the special issue’s contents and contributions to ongoing conversations in the field.

Comics-based how-to instructions have historically figured into a gender-aware category of technical communication. Studying such comics-based literature for gendering is a promising endeavor that has not garnered much scholarly attention to date. This analysis attempts to do so within the critical framework of comics studies. Through close examination of examples of gendered instructional comics past and present, this article argues that the comics medium is well suited to inform and persuade readerships through gendered means.

Comics provide a promising platform for technical communication, but there are limits to their affordances. This article demonstrates some of the limits using Robert Sikoryak’s Terms and Conditions, a graphic adaptation of Apple’s iTunes Terms and Conditions. Using discourse analysis, it argues that Sikoryak’s adaptation, while an impressive piece of art, is not an example of accessible user agreement as media reports claim. The article concludes with practical implications on producing comics-style technical communication.

Journalists, politicians, and law enforcement professionals have linked anarchist cookbooks to various crimes including bank robberies, hijackings, terrorist attacks, and mass shootings. By braiding comics scholarship with tactical technical communication (TTC), this article asks how anarchist cookbooks deploy comics techniques, formal features, and affordances to convey subversive tactics to audiences. We identify visual-verbal tactics that recur throughout anarchist cookbooks, identify comics elements associated with these tactics, and suggest implications for research and practice.

This graphic meditation on issues of cultural relevance and accessibility in comic-based health communication texts presents the web of rhetorical considerations inherent in creating culturally accessible health communication texts. Applying recent technical communication theories related to social justice this article will examine contemporary instances of comics being used as health communication tools for culturally diverse patient populations. The authors offer original drawings and text for the article.

Technical communication research has relied heavily on participatory, user-focused strategies as well as “participative”, posthuman frameworks. Both research methodologies have various strengths, yet also have been critiqued for underplaying the role of human and non-human agency (respectively) in rhetorical situations. Through an analysis of an urban planning comic book, I suggest that turning to the Greek concept of methexis – or “participation” – may help technical communication researchers bridge posthuman and user-centered investigative approaches.

Part of learning a discipline’s genres is learning how one’s work must be presented. Students confronting this economy of genre sometimes chafe at its restrictions, and their apprehension reveals unsuspected stakes for technical communication. In interviews, students discuss how their final presentations fail to capture the sophistication and the nuances of their designs, suggesting that learning genres is not just about participation but also about letting go of competing ways of conceiving practice.

The practice of helping users accomplish tasks with various technologies has long been a central concern for technical communicators. For Jason Swarts, this activity sits at the core of technical c...

Building upon critical and intercultural work in the field, Haas and Eble’s edited collection, Key Theoretical Frameworks: Teaching Technical Communication in the Twenty-First Century offers a soci...

I appreciate that this paper was applauded for its thoughtful approach to assessing “prescription drug labels (PDLs)” using rhetorical principles. However, I believe the authors’ invention of the composite artifact “PDL” and their subsequent assessment based on this flawed concept is problematic and may weaken the validity of their conclusions.

As globalization exerts a higher demand on the technical communication profession, technical communication scholars and practitioners have paid significant attention to translation/localization (St...

Recently, educators have created crowdsourced syllabi using social media. Activist syllabi are digitally circulated public collections of knowledge and knowledge-making about events and social movements. As technical communicators, we can function as curators of public intellectualism by providing accessibility and usability guidance for these activist syllabi in collaboration with activist syllabi creators. In turn, technical communicators can work with syllabi creators as a coalitional social justice strategy to enhance the circulation of these activist syllabi.

Environmental discourses remain an important area of concern for technical communicators and rhetoricians who seek to evaluate the social actions of their genres (Dayton, 2002; Miller, 1984); addre...

"Rhetoric and Communication Perspectives on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault." Technical Communication Quarterly, 28(4), pp. 426–427