This article assesses the data practices of Grammarly, the prominent AI-assisted writing technology, by applying data principles that advocate for empowering Indigenous data sovereignty. The assessment is informed by the authors’ work with an Inuit tribal organization from rural Arctic Alaska that generated data and metadata about potentially sacred tribal activities. Their analysis of Grammarly's large-language modeling practices demonstrates how technical communication can hold businesses to principled data practices created by Indigenous nations and communities that understand how to create more just futures.

This symposium builds from our discussions about communities, academia, activism, and access as four faculty members with different positionalities and perspectives to advocate for the protection of relations in the face of universities’ demands for access to peoples, communities, and lands. In each of four individually authored reflections, we recount our experiences working with and being in community as part of our academic practice. We extend from work in disability studies to explain that while access is generally understood to be good, and often is, access can also be the precursor to exploitation. We argue that to mitigate that risk, we can take on a positive gatekeeping function as part of being in community with care.

Risk communication is traditionally authored by institutions and addressed to the potentially affected publics for whom they are responsible. This study expands the scope of risk communication by analyzing safety guides produced by a hypermarginalized group for whom institutions show no responsibility: full-contact, street-level sex workers. Using corpus-assisted discourse analysis and keyword analysis to reveal patterns of word choices, the authors argue that the safety guides exhibit characteristics and qualities of professional communication: audience adaptation, social responsibility, and ethical awareness. This area of inquiry—the DIY, peer-to-peer, extrainstitutional risk communication produced by marginalized people—widens technical and professional communication's approach to risk communication.

This article argues that academic manuscript review is a site for activism, using Anzaldúa’s theory of conocimiento as a framework to contextualize the reviewer’s role in this process. It demonstrates that conocimiento provides a structure for engaging in the manuscript-review process in a way that mediates among potentially conflicting worldviews. Conocimiento informs more justice-oriented reviewing and positions the anonymous reviewer as activist. This article explores each stage of conocimiento and anonymous review through multifaceted methods: storytelling, theory, and a synthesis of the two. It ends by presenting concrete, action-based takeaways for reviewers who want to approach reviewing justly and equitably.

The recent uptick in TPC scholarship related to decolonial methods, methodologies, and praxis warrants careful consideration about how this framework is used in TPC scholarship. Using a critique of decolonial scholars, the authors reconsider their use of “decolonial” to describe their experience with urban foraging as a practice that subverts modern Euro-Western foodways. This article uses experiential narrative as a way to theorize about technology as it relates to decolonial perspectives on bodies and nutrition.