Building from a recent history of how technical and professional communication has addressed risk, we argue that the spatial and temporal frames through which the field has encountered risk must be confronted in working toward climate justice. We offer topoi that can be deployed to trace these interconnections and apply them to The Law of the River in the Colorado River Basin to illustrate how case studies can demonstrate the unequal distribution of climate risk.

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 article explores how “flatten the curve” (FTC) visualizations have served as a rhetorical anchor for communicating the risk of viral spread during the COVID-19 pandemic. Beginning from the premise that risk visualizations have eclipsed their original role as supplemental to public risk messaging and now function as an organizer of discourse, the authors highlight three rhetorical tensions (epideictic–deliberative, global–local, conceptual metaphors–data representations) with the goal of considering how the field of technical and professional communication might more strongly support visual risk literacy in future crises.

On behalf of SIGDOC and CDQ, we wanted to reach out to all of you and thank you for all you do in this difficult time. Our organization's greatest strength is in its members, and we hope you are all staying as safe and sane as possible while COVID-19 changes the way we work and play. SIGDOC has yet to reach an official decision on the viability or nature of our 2020 Conference in Denton, TX, but the Executive Committee along with this year's Conference Committee, lead by Stacey Pigg, are in consistent contact and weighing options. Above all else, our decision will be informed by the values that we have articulated as an organization, which are: valuing human well-being; engaging in financial stewardship; respecting labor; foregrounding accessibility; supporting early-career scholars; establishing continuity; managing community and networkbuilding; supporting innovation; valuing industry practices; and maintaining and facilitating interorganizational and international relationships. The option for SIGDOC 2020 that best addresses these core values will be the option we select. For now, we have confirmation that the proceedings publications will be moving forward and supported by ACM and included in the Digital Library regardless of the decision we make on the conference. This is great news, and fulfills our values in supporting scholarship and valuing the labor done by our authors, reviewers, and our program cochairs, Josephine Walwema and Daniel Hocutt, who have worked diligently in the midst of the pandemic. CDQ will continue to publish as often as we are able. We understand that our workflows have changed, dramatically for some of us. So while it may be that extra time is occasionally needed for a review, we remain committed to providing you as rapid turnaround as we can, and publishing cutting-edge research on communication design through our original articles, experience reports, and book reviews. In this issue, for example, we are pleased to share with you Sonia Stephens and Dan Richards' "Story mapping and sea level rise: Listening to global risks at street level," and Jennifer Roth Miller, Brandy Dieterle, Jennifer deWinter, and Stephanie Vie's "Social media in professional, technical, and scientific communication programs: A heuristic to guide future use." These two excellent articles are accompanied by reviews of Jonanna Boehnert's Design, ecology politics: Towards the ecocene, reviewed by Ryan Cheek, and Christa Teston's Bodies in flux: Scientific methods for negotiating medical uncertainty, reviewed by Ella Browning.

While interactive maps are important tools for risk communication, most maps omit the lived experiences and personal stories of the community members who are most at risk. We describe a project to develop an interactive tool that juxtaposes coastal residents' videorecorded stories about sea level rise and coastal flooding with an interactive map that shows future sea level rise projections. We outline project development including digital platform selection, project design, participant recruitment, and narrative framing, and tie our design decisions to rhetorical and ethical considerations of interest for others developing interactive tools with community participation.

This introduction frames this special issue on ideological transparency by contextualizing the original call for papers within our sociopolitical moment and outlining how various themes emerged — or did not — from the articles included. The editors posit that more nuance is needed in the justifications for how, why, and whether or not teachers of writing and literature inflect their own politics in class.

The design of online interactive visualizations is an ongoing area of research within technical communication, with recent work focusing on visualizations in risk-based contexts. This article shares the results of a large-scale user experience study on a popular interactive sea-level rise viewer aimed at facilitating decision making for individual users in coastal communities. Using this viewer, participants performed three major tasks related to individual property, community impacts, and future projections and gave feedback on the design, use value, and functionality of the tool. The participants were assessed on their ability to complete the three major tasks. The author discusses the implications of these results on the continued design of interactive risk visualizations and argues for a vision of user agency that is more constrained within the larger ethical paradigms of environmental communication.

Interactive sea level rise viewers (ISLRVs) are an increasingly popular risk communication technology designed to help users visualize the effects of water inundation on their region so as to facilitate more prudent decision-making. Designed by and for a variety of stakeholders, these viewers generally have as their goal affording users a more "localized" experience with climate change and sea level rise data, allowing users to explore as specific as street-level the effects of rising waters in coastal regions. While the rise of these tools mirrors the trend in risk communication scholarship towards more localized messaging, there is still more work to be done in terms of providing a more localized user experience for a broader public audience. This article presents the results of a user experience study conducted with 12 residents of a coastal region, the results of which formulate an attempt to develop more insight into techniques for designer localization. The article concludes with concrete recommendations for scholars and practitioners concerned with designing more effective interactive risk communication technologies that respond to the public need for localized information for decision-making.

This article argues that the field of Rhetoric and Composition has long harnessed the active potential of metaphor to change its own practices but has considerably overlooked student use of metaphor—a particularly urgent oversight given the metaphorical battleground that constitutes the discourse of contemporary higher education. Using this exigency, the article 1) explains how a more thorough reading of Lakoff and Johnson’s popular work on metaphor theory can re-energize Rhetoric and Composition to be more inclusive of student experiences in classroom coverage of metaphor and 2) offers imaginative but concrete pedagogical approaches and activities aimed at facilitating student learning of metaphor in the context of a consumer-based “University of Excellence.”