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.

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.

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).