On various campuses, including the author’s, “safe space” stickers are used to designate offices supposedly free of homophobia. The author critiques this practice, pointing out that it still privileges the white heterosexual subject while also obscuring connections between sexuality, gender, and race.

Abstract This article answers Carl Hemdl's call for furthering critical approaches to research in professional communication by forwarding Kenneth Burke's concepts of symbolic action, dramatism, and the pentad. This article illustrates, through an analysis of data gathered in a case study of technical writers, how Burke provides us with tools that can produce more varied terministic screens for how critical researchers conceptualize, interpret, and analyze workplace communication.

Leading intellectuals tend to assume responsibility for imagining alternatives and do so within a set of discourses and institutions burdened genealogically by multifaceted complicities with power that make them dangerous to people. As agencies of these discourses that greatly affect the lives of people one might say leading intellectuals are a tool of oppression and most so precisely when they arrogate the right and power to judge and imagine efficacious alternatives—a process that we might suspect, sustains leading intellectuals at the expense of others. —Paul Bove (1986: 227)