This makes me wonder, isn’t the whole point of having easy access to healthcare to enable human beings to live a better life, irrespective of their race, religion, gender, nationality, class, or economic status? Isn’t healthcare a basic human right provided even to the minority ethnic populations, like myself, so that we can live a life of dignity and good health?

<roman xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><b>Background:</b></roman> Building a reputable network on Twitter is viewed as impactful in several scholarly disciplines, but little is known about the professional and interdisciplinary human-computer interaction (HCI) community. This study combined two approaches from scholarly communication and technical communication to capture the static and dynamic features of the HCI scholar Twitter network. <roman xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><b>Literature review:</b></roman> Related studies that described the scholarly reputation built through Twitter and social networking in the field of HCI were reviewed and discussed. <roman xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><b>Research questions:</b></roman> 1. In which countries are HCI scholars more likely to follow their peers in the same country? 2. What are the characteristics (country, reputation) and actions (reciprocity) of HCI scholars who are more likely to build HCI scholarly network profiles on Twitter? <roman xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><b>Research methodology:</b></roman> The network analysis method of the exponential random graph model (ERGM) was adopted to trace and visualize current follower networks on Twitter. <roman xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><b>Results and discussion:</b></roman> We found that 22.9% of HCI scholars use Twitter and that reciprocity and country of current employment best drive the Twitter connections of scholars. Characteristics of HCI scholars’ tie formation online are also illustrated and discussed. <roman xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><b>Implications for practice:</b></roman> This study contributes to field studies of professional networks by identifying the structural properties and factors that influence scholars’ search for professional development on Twitter. The empirical findings should be a helpful reference for HCI professional societies and individual scholars in operating online professional networks.

Background: The usability of university websites is important to ascertain that they serve their intended purpose. Their usability can be evaluated either by testing methods that rely on actual users or by inspection methods that rely on experts for evaluation. Heuristic evaluation and guideline reviews are two inspection methods of usability evaluation. A heuristic evaluation consists of a few general heuristics (rules), which are limited to checking general flaws in the design. A guideline review uses a much larger set of guidelines/suggestions that fit a specific business domain. Literature review: Most of the literature has equated usability studies with testing methods and has given less focus to inspection methods. Moreover, those studies have examined usability in a general sense and not in domain- and culture-specific contexts. Research questions: 1. Do domain- and culture-specific heuristic evaluation and guideline reviews work similarly in evaluating the usability of applications? 2. Which of these methods is better in terms of the nature of evaluation, time needed for evaluation, evaluation procedure, templates adopted, and evaluation results? 3. Which method is better in terms of thoroughness and reliability? Research methodology : This study uses a comparative methodology. The two inspection methods—guideline reviews and heuristic evaluation—are compared in a domain- and the culture-specific context in terms of the nature, time required, approach, templates, and results. Results: The results reflect that both methods identify similar usability issues; however, they differ in terms of the nature, time duration, evaluation procedure, templates, and results of the evaluation. Conclusion: This study contributes by providing insights for practitioners and researchers about the choice of an evaluation method for domain- and culture-specific evaluation of university websites.

In Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2010), Jane Bennett encourages her readers to slow down the internal thoughts of human superiority over "intrinsically inanimate matter" --- thoughts that prevent them from "detecting...a fuller range of the nonhuman powers circulating around and within human bodies" and their political systems (p. ix). Some readers of CDQ may wonder why a book from 2010 is worth our attention in 2022. The COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling on women's reproductive autonomy, and the restrictions placed on the EPA's control over carbon emissions all suggest a clear resurgence of what Bennett calls the oft-repeated "vitalism-materialism debate" (p. 90)---the debate over how far affect, agency, animacy, and vitality extend. Bennett resolves the tensions of that debate by fusing traditional ideas of mechanistic materialism with the notions of an unknowable agency in all matter (not just humans), an agency that lacks representation in current political thought. If technical communicators and designers dedicated to crisis/risk communication as well as those studying and producing political technologies (Cheek, 2021, 2022) didn't see the application of Bennett's "vital materialism" at the end of the Bush era's heated debates over stem cell research and the war in Iraq as well as the North American power blackout of 2003, then perhaps, given the current political climate, I can persuade them to find merit in revisiting Bennett's arguments.

Communication and collaboration are essential parts of the game development process. However, during the global pandemic, the shift to remote work marked a sudden change in how developers could communicate and collaborate with one another, as usual ad-hoc conversations that happen in physical offices were nonexistent. Based on a partnership grant study with the International Game Developers Association (IGDA), this piece focuses on the results of a survey that examined developers' mental health and productivity during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings suggest that most game developers want a hybrid or fully remote position even after pandemic conditions subside. Failure to address the pandemic's impact on the game development industry risks ignoring a rich area of technical communication complicated by, and responsive to, hybrid workplaces.

Our paper centers embodiment as a theme and a process in research through describing the fine-grained practices and everyday interactions that shape collaborative research in the contexts of watershed restoration and environmental monitoring. We focus on embodiment because it offers a means for attending to the process and politics of knowledge production within and across boundaries. We offer two case studies that focus on embodiment to structure research processes and shape ongoing, emergent, and collaborative research practices. We argue technical communication as a field is well positioned to include embodied practices in research design and writing.

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.

Based on survey responses from eighty-five scholars on the job market from 2013 and 2019, this article examines mentoring for the job market in rhetoric and composition and technical communication. Respondents indicate needs for job market mentoring; more transparency about the job market itself; and more extensive, integrated support throughout graduate programs. The article concludes with actions that can be taken to improve the job market experience in rhetoric and composition and technical communication programs.

Jaclyn Carter is an educational development consultant at the University of Calgary and coeditor of Women and War from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance (2020).Michael Tavel Clarke is associate professor of English at the University of Calgary. He is the author of These Days of Large Things: The Culture of Size in America (2007) and coeditor with David Wittenberg of Scale in Literature and Culture (2017). He coedits the journal ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature with Faye Halpern.Maura D'Amore is professor of English at St. Michael's College in Colchester, Vermont. She is the author of Suburban Plots: Men at Home in Nineteenth-Century American Print Culture (2014).Faye Halpern is associate professor of English at the University of Calgary. She is the author, most recently, of an article in Narrative called “Charles Chesnutt, Rhetorical Passing, and the Flesh-and-Blood Author: A Case for Considering Authorial Intention.” She coedits the journal ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature with Michael Tavel Clarke.Derritt Mason is associate professor of English at the University of Calgary. He is the author of Queer Anxieties of Young Adult Literature and Culture (2021) and the coeditor, with Kenneth B. Kidd, of Queer as Camp: Essays on Summer, Style, and Sexuality (2019).Rachel McCabe is an assistant professor and director of writing at La Salle University. Her research focuses on the affective experience and its importance to the reading and viewing of texts and how doing so impacts the student writing process. She also considers how positions of power and privilege influence the interpretation process. Her scholarship has been published in Composition Studies, Studies in Documentary Film, and Compass.Jessica Nicol is an educational developer at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology (SAIT) and author of the recent chapbook Can I Ask You a Question? (2020).Zack Shaw is a fourth-year PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of Florida, where he studies rhetoric and composition, film and media studies, and animation. He has taught upper- and lower-division courses, covering diverse topics such as film analysis, argumentative writing, technical writing, first-year composition, and media composing. He designs each of his courses with the ultimate goal of creating a multimodal, inclusive, and accessible educational experience for all students. He holds a Master of Arts degree in English from Northeastern University, and his work has previously appeared in Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy and ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies.Anne Shea is associate professor and chair of the Writing and Literature Program at California College of the Arts. Her fields of teaching and research include twentieth- and twenty-first-century North American literature and composition. She has published essays in College Literature, Contemporary Literature, MELUS, and Women's Studies, among others.Nathan Shepley is associate professor of English at the University of Houston, where he teaches rhetoric and composition courses at all levels. The author of Placing the History of College Writing: Stories from the Incomplete Archive (2016) and articles in journals including Reflections and Composition Studies, he studies interactions among place, history, and college student writing. He remains active in creating pedagogical resources for and otherwise assisting his fellow instructors at the UH Department of English.William Stroup is professor of English at Keene State College, New Hampshire's public liberal arts college. He teaches courses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature and on environmental literatures in many traditions. He has presented on Jane Austen and pedagogy at MLA and his essays have appeared in The Wordsworth Circle, ISLE, volumes on Wordsworth and the Green Romantics, and elsewhere. He is currently editing an unpublished play by the poet Amy Clampitt about Dorothy and William Wordsworth and serving as a Thayer trustee of the Keene Public Library.Morgan Vanek is assistant professor of English at the University of Calgary. She is currently at work on a book titled “The Politics of the Weather, 1700–1775.” Research related to this project has recently appeared in Studies in Canadian Literature/Études en littérature canadienne, Eighteenth-Century Studies, and Eighteenth-Century Fiction.Paul Walker is a professor of English at Murray State University, where he teaches rhetoric, writing, and literature. His published work has primarily focused on composition, assessment, environmental rhetoric, and archival research. He is the founder and editor of Intraspection: A Journal of Rhetoric, Culture, and Style, and is currently working on a monograph about the rhetoric of ordinary heroism.

This article follows up on the conversation about new streams of approaches in technical communication and user experience (UX) design, i.e., design thinking, content strategy, and artificial intelligence (AI), which afford implications for professional practice. By extending such implications to technical communication pedagogy, we aim to demonstrate the importance of paying attention to these streams in our programmatic development and provide strategies for doing so.

This essay argues that technical rhetoric in ancient Athens is neither well nor fully understood in its present historical characterization but rather is best realized as occupying a position on a spectrum of literate skills ranging from an art to a craft. The dismissive views of technical writing advanced by Plato and Aristotle should be reconsidered and specialized literate practices be recognized as an important feature of rhetoric in Athens’ classical period. A review of discursive and material (archaeological) evidence reveals that technical writing was evolving into a craft-skill in Athens as early as the archaic period and, by the classical period, would be regarded as a respected “rhetorical” profession of artistic expression. This essay urges readers to reconsider the restrictive characterization of rhetoric advanced by some historians of rhetoric and include the specialist craft-skills of writing as a manifestation of technical rhetoric that both illustrates, and more accurately represents, the range of classical rhetoric in ancient Athens.

Technical communication has long acknowledged that documents can be unethical and even oppressive and harmful. But not all forms or experiences of oppression are equivalent or similar, and it can be instrumental to analyze in particular how certain groups are wounded by specific documents. In this article, the authors use Ahmed's queer phenomenology to analyze institutional and government documents and demonstrate the ways that these technical documents create failed orientations. Then, through a focused analysis of a federal proposal policy, they show how these documents can produce failures for trans people in particular. The authors close by suggesting courses of actions for redressing these failures.

Successfully adapting to organizational changes during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis necessitated the effective deployment of technical communication texts delineating the expectations and structures for guiding behavior and interactions. A dearth of system-wide familiarity with changes in modalities has disrupted expectations and impacted engagement. During acute events, business and technical communicators will probably not be the initial source of transition messaging. Instead, this task will fall on managers, faculty, and other front-line communicators. The authors present pragmatic recommendations for adapting familiar discourses, semiotics, and mental scripts so that communicators can more effectively intervene during crises to ease organizational transitions and decrease uncertainty.

This book provides an up-to-date, research-based, but practical and accessible description of contemporary technical communication practice in a global environment. It gives readers a thorough understanding of the technical communication field by emphasizing how it should be viewed as a profession, how one might pursue a career in it, and finally how to practice it. Finally, the book draws the reader’s attention to background material with a succinct summary of ideas that have been popularized in both literature and practice. In addition, the book’s extensive multiple method study methodology provides a solid justification for the information’s foundation. The book has nine chapters that are divided into the following three sections: An introduction to the fundamentals of technical communication as a profession; an examination into how diverse the technical communication profession is—for instance, by examining the many competencies required, various sorts of activities that are performed, and various work environment options accessible, including working from home; and finally, an introduction into the theories and procedures that serve as the book’s foundation and link the first two sections to a research framework. This book is accessible and useful for industry practitioners, students, and teachers. The book also helps novices by giving them all the knowledge they need about the subject, educational options, societies, technologies, necessary skills, workplaces, and the need to adapt quickly to changing conditions to meet future needs. Real-world case studies and the sharing of technical communicators’ real experiences are of tremendous value to professionals and will aid in the development of their technical communication skills.

<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Background:</b> Self-disclosure on social media can cause some privacy risks, but it benefits users and businesses if adequately managed. Companies may benefit from users’ self-disclosure on social media to better understand the consumers’ needs, customize services or products, and address users’ concerns to sculpt positive brand reputation, trust, and sales. In addition, users’ better understanding of self-disclosure motivations helps them manage more suitable topic, platform, and concepts to match the intended online personal or professional persona. Finally, technical communicators’ understanding of the motivation for social media self-disclosures can help them leverage available self-disclosure in producing more effective technical communication and carefully plan self-disclosures with clear motivations. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Literature review:</b> Many researchers have studied the varying self-disclosure motivations, but to the best of our knowledge, no mapping studies are currently available summarizing the motivations of self-disclosure on social media. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Research question:</b> What does the current research about self-disclosure identify as users’ motivation for self-disclosure on social media? <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Research methodology:</b> We conducted a systematic mapping study that included relevant journal and conference publications. Mapping studies are suitable for structuring a broad research field concerning research questions about content, methods, or trends in the existing publications. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Results:</b> We found four categories for social media self-disclosures: discloser-related, audience-related, platform- and affordances-related, and perceived risk- and cost-related. Within the main categories, we found varying submotivations. We also discuss the implications of our findings and future research needs. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Conclusions:</b> The mapping of available studies helps researchers, academics, and practitioners understand existing self-disclosure motivations and research gaps. In addition, social media stakeholders planning to use social media self-disclosures within their areas of interest can use this study as a starting point to understand what drives social media self-disclosures.

Design thinking, broadly understood as an organizational and entrepreneurial process aimed at innovative problem solving, has been productively incorporated by scholar-teachers in rhetoric, writing studies, and technical communication. Business communication offers similar opportunities. After briefly explaining design thinking and reviewing related scholarship and pedagogy, the article traces the process of creating an innovative course in business communication through each phase or mode of this recursive method: empathizing with users, defining the problem, ideating and prototyping solutions, and testing and evaluating the prototypes. The article positions course design as a project grounded in radical collaboration, with diverse colleagues as well as students.

This article theorizes infrastructures and their components as rhetorical objects for analysis and persuasive use. Though the term infrastructure has been applied broadly to several studies in the social sciences, writing, technical communication, and technology studies, infrastructures have yet to be systematically theorized as an active persuasive consideration for those engaging in communicative practice. This article makes a case for a taxonomic theoretical understanding and conceptualization of infrastructure that may lead to new methodological developments in future research. This theory builds from theories of infrastructures as relational networks of social interaction around objects. The article aims to assist the persuasive endeavors of those engaged in communicative practice in infrastructural settings.

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.

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.

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.

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.

As one kind of designed communication, technical communication is created for readers we assume use the content for some situated purpose. Understanding users and their situations to be varied, communicators rely on simplified models of both to create usable content. In many cases, this approach works, but in some commercial sectors, companies are recognizing a need to engage with users directly and to include them in the production of communication. Including users in the production of communication may ease the burden of communicating in ways that are sufficiently detailed, accurate, inclusive, localized, and timely, but these ventures also create challenges of collaboration that direct attention to how users are situated in infrastructures that allow them to act as effective readers and collaborators. This article presents a model of users, situating them amid infrastructures that extend their ability to take rhetorical action. The authors explain and demonstrate a heuristic for analyzing infrastructure as an extension of a user's "mediated potential" for rhetorical action.

Despite their central importance to a variety of endeavors and despite widespread use in both industry and academia, version control systems (software for tracking versions of files) have not been extensively studied in fields related to technical communication, rhetoric, and communication design. Git, by far the most dominant version control system today, is largely absent. This study theorizes Git as boundary infrastructure---infrastructure used to facilitate collaboration across disciplines and domains. The unique characteristics of boundary infrastructure explain how something as prominent as Git can be so invisible and help identify dangers posed by boundary infrastructure. Drawing on modes of resistance developed in feminist rhetorics, this article concludes with suggestions to ameliorate the negatives effects such infrastructure might have on collaborative knowledge work.

As artificial intelligence (AI) automates technical and dialogic processes, technical communicators produce value through articulating complex problems, facilitating new forms of participation, and managing user-generated content via experience architecture. Automated and intelligent agents are least able to grasp the context of experiences, requiring human input/feedback for maximum performance. The examples we trace both prepare communities to embrace AI as part of the available information infrastructure and create an automated infrastructure of intelligent augmented action. Following Star's anthropological investigation of infrastructure, we analyze organizational examples where rhetoric entangles AI, automation, generative design, additive manufacturing, gift labor, and assembly lines.

The use of design thinking (DT) as a pedagogical and problem-solving strategy has been gaining interest in technical and professional communication (TPC) for years, and Jason Tham'sDesign Thinking in Technical Communicationis the best and most comprehensive statement on this topic that our discipline has created yet. The book first overviews its central concepts (DT and "making"), then illustrates very concretely how those concepts can improve pedagogy, social advocacy, and collaboration in TPC. All the book's chapters (except the conclusion and first chapter) contain empirical elements, which Tham uses to support his points.

In this article, I focus on two competing technical communication discourses used to represent the biometric technology Ghana adopted in 2012 and subsequent elections to demonstrate how communication about technology could potentially marginalize local, nondominant knowledge systems whereas it privileges global, dominant knowledge systems. Representation of the biometric technology, therefore, reflects ways that technical communication can become complicit in silencing, excluding, and marginalizing local voices. I call attention to how communication that focuses on dominant narratives obscures and delegitimizes the knowledge of disenfranchised and less privileged groups.

This article historicizes the impact of the Common Rule, which mandates the existence of Institutional Review Boards, on technical and professional communication (TPC) research with a focus on the principle of justice. Justice is discussed as a complex principle that must be internally and coherently balanced along several axes in the design, implementation, and promulgation of research in technical communication. The author proposes that with shared language, which in this article begins with one principle—justice—TPC researchers can more plainly articulate their positions in the development and dissemination of scholarship, thereby adding coherence to ethical work in the 21st century.

<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Introduction:</b> Design thinking has gained popularity over the last few decades due to its promise for social innovation and user-centered solutions for technical communication practices and pedagogy. Yet, our increasingly complex sociotechnical climate calls for the historical examination of the decades-old problem-solving model and re-envisioning of the prospect of design thinking in academia and industry. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Research questions:</b> 1. What prominent historical narratives have informed design-thinking values and practices as we know them today? 2. What could be the future of design thinking in the technical communication profession? <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Research methodology:</b> This article interrogates the historiography of design thinking by mapping its dominant narratives and constructs antenarrative futures by weaving adjuvant accounts into new trajectories for technical communication purposes and aspirations. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Results:</b> Based on the mapping of historical traces of design-thinking narratives, this article presents two root accounts of design-thinking development—the efficiency narrative and the participatory narrative—with key identifiers and examples. Retracing the stories to highlight stances of nondominant sources, the findings indicate the importance of social advocacy through two main antenarratives—inclusion and social justice. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Conclusion and future research:</b> Taking into account the antenaratives of design thinking, future applications should center inclusion and social justice advocacy in academic as well as industry settings. Future studies may investigate this approach to implementing design thinking and examine the corresponding outcomes.

<roman xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><b>Introduction:</b></roman> Social media have been widely used for corporation-generated narratives. Corporate communication entails a “storytelling process” and a narrative perspective. Corporate narrative has taken on new forms with the emergence of social media, which is the object of this study and called corporations’ owned social media narrative (COSMN). To our knowledge, however, no research has systematically investigated studies on COSMN. Our study provides a synthesized review on the strategies and functions of COSMN. <roman xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><b>Research questions:</b></roman> 1. What are the general characteristics of studies on COSMN? 2. What strategies are usually adopted by corporations via their social media narrative? 3. What functions do corporations intend to achieve by their social media narrative? <roman xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><b>Methodology:</b></roman> We conducted an integrative literature review of studies on corporations’ owned social media narrative based on journal articles from the database of the Web of Science Core Collection. After retrieving 25 articles in accordance with our research purpose, we conducted a qualitative content analysis to describe general characteristics of the literature and identify narrative strategies and functions. <roman xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><b>Results and conclusions:</b></roman> When corporations undertake advertising, branding, and social networking activities (among others) on social media, they tend to use form-based narrative strategies (technical strategy and formality strategy), content-based narrative strategies (broadcasting strategy, reacting strategy, engaging strategy, and emotional strategy), and medium-based narrative strategy (transmedia strategy) to achieve functions of market communication, technical communication, and public relations work (identity construction, impression management, stakeholder endorsement, corporate social responsibility communication, and crisis communication). This integrative literature review provides theoretical implications for corporate social media research and practical implications for digital marketing practitioners.

<roman xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><b>Background</b>:</roman> Social media like YouTube have transformative effects on technical communication. Technical communication scholars have attended to the increasing use of social media personally, pedagogically, and professionally. Our stream of research focuses on YouTube videos for educational purposes within the various research avenues. <roman xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><b>Literature review</b>:</roman> YouTube has become a viable platform for learning. YouTube educational videos have been studied from many different perspectives, yet research on engagement with YouTube educational videos is scarce, despite the importance of engagement in both learning and social media. Following extant research on YouTube educational video features, we probe the effects of visual cueing on social media engagement. <roman xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><b>Research question</b>:</roman> How does visual cueing (anchors and intrinsic visual features) affect social media engagement with YouTube educational videos? <roman xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><b>Methodology</b>:</roman> We sampled 196 YouTube educational videos on 28 physics and astronomy topics, and extracted visual cueing from the videos and social media engagement information from YouTube. Multiple linear regression analyses were conducted. <roman xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><b>Results</b>:</roman> Our analyses show that intrinsic visual features (color contrast and visual complexity) are significantly related to social media engagement (involvement, intimacy, and interaction), while anchors (math equations and models) are not. <roman xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><b>Conclusion</b>:</roman> Our study supports the empirical knowledge on social media engagement with YouTube educational videos and expands on the technical communication research for YouTube educational videos. In addition, this research contributes to the literature on engagement by extending its relevance to the social media learning environment. Finally, our study provides content creators with new video design insights that can be used to enhance social media engagement with YouTube educational videos.

Background: Technical communicators use special language information to describe technology products. Researching such information is part and parcel of their job and thus occupies a relevant share of their working time. Literature review: Numerous studies examine information needs and search techniques of various professionals, such as engineers or translators. However, very little is known about technical communicators’ use of and requirements for information sources containing special language information. This article contributes to filling this research gap by discussing results of an empirical study. Research questions: 1. What types of nonhuman information sources do technical communicators use when researching special language information? 2. What properties do technical communicators expect from special language reference tools? Research methodology: We conducted a written online survey among technical communicators. In this article, we analyze and interpret survey data related to the two research questions. Results: Respondents use 14 major types of information sources for researching special language information. Half can be categorized as reference tools, while the other half are document-like. Respondents would like to have special language reference tools that are available electronically, can be adapted to their personal needs, and offer up-to-date information with good usability. Conclusions: Half of the information source types are document-like and can be used as text corpora. Thus, text corpus-management methods and tools should be promoted in technical communication practice and teaching. Technical communicators’ requirements and wishes described in this article lay the groundwork for developing tailor-made special language reference tools.

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.