We provide a tour of the ecology of emerging digital tools and artifacts that increasingly mediate public engagement with science in the context of environmental decision making. As our examination of emerging technologies in this context illustrates, while not all technical communication is science communication, science communication is increasingly also productively viewed as technical communication.

The public release of ChatGPT in 2022 ushered in a new era, affirming the present reality of AI-assisted writing and the critical role business instructors play in preparing students. This study presents the results of a pedagogical experiment. Specifically, it evaluates strategies for integrating and teaching about AI in the business communication classroom, focusing on the impact of generative AI on students’ understanding of business writing principles and how different levels of engagement with AI influence students’ critical AI literacy and attitudes toward AI-assisted writing in the workplace.

This article presents a pilot study in agentive modeling, a mixed-methods approach for visualizing networked models of agency. The study assesses technical and public seismic risk visuals from the websites of key organizations concerned with seismic activity. Preliminary findings indicate the need for visuals that stage more complex networks in order to create greater opportunities for engagement and danger-reducing action.

<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Introduction:</b> Preparing students to pursue user-experience (UX)-related writing careers requires infusing UX instruction into several technical communication courses throughout a degree program. But university writing programs that seek to add UX courses into their curricula often work inside a slow-paced system where amending course objectives to align with job market demands is a slow process. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">About the case:</b> For this collaboration, we forged a symbiotic relationship between a lower- and upper-class course to introduce students to UX early in their program of study and apply additional or nuanced UX methods in several writing courses as they progress through the program. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Situating the case:</b> Faculty in a writing program that does not currently have stand-alone UX classes can collaboratively improve the student UX in a timely fashion while maintaining the flexibility to adapt best practices and contemporary UX processes across classrooms. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Methods/approach:</b> A close reading of test plans (n = 14), usability reports, and reflection essays from 200-level students provided key insights into the understanding of UX strategies. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Results/discussion:</b> Introductory students struggled to make explicit connections between UX strategies and their work, but they demonstrated gained UX skills by the end of the project. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Conclusions:</b> Students realized many benefits from learning about and conducting UX research that helped them become more empathetic professional writers. However, instructors should consider additional symbiotic relationships between courses in a professional writing program at several points in the writing process.

This short article offers examples of how rhetoricians of health and medicine (RHM) can employ user experience (UX) design principles and practices to enhance student learning in courses that focus on scientific, health, and/or medical communication. More specifically, we propose a participatory health communication pedagogy that can help RHM educators leverage UX principles to meaningfully incorporate students’ experiences into the classroom as both content creators and content users. We argue that by framing students as both creators and users, RHM educators can enact classroom practices and approaches that more fully account for diversity and inclusivity, a process that better accounts for “racism and other forms of injustice [that] permeate health and medicine” (Scott, Melonçon & Molloy, 2020, p.vii). Drawing from two RHM courses as case studies, we demonstrate how a participatory health communication pedagogy can help educators become innovative, UX practitioners who center students’ learning experiences as they design content for health and medical contexts.

Effectively addressing wicked problems requires collaborative, embedded action. But, in many cases, scholarly commitments, social justice, privilege, and precarity collide in ways that make it difficult for community-engaged scholars to ethically navigate competing duties. This article presents our efforts to support reciprocal community engagement in addressing cancer- obesity comorbidity and risk coincidence in underserved communities. Partnering with community healthcare professionals, we conducted an adapted Systems Ethnography/Qualitative Modeling (SEQM) study. SEQM offers an alternative ethical framework for community-engaged research, one that supports reciprocity through enabling participant-centered community self-definition, goal setting, and solution identification.

In this essay, we propose a hack of existing models of environmental risk communication so that they will better address Anthropocene risks. We focus our discussion on a key area of risk communication: environmental risk visualization (ERV). Drawing on social-constructionist theories of risk and our own research on ERVs, we assemble criteria for designing and evaluating ERVs based on their hybrid collectivity---meaning their ability to collect agents around themselves over time and across traditional Modern divides between human/nonhuman, expert/nonexpert, and nature/culture. We test the criteria on two ERVs from the 2011 Fukushima disaster and discuss the resulting promises and challenges of an approach to risk communication motivated by hybrid collectivity.

On October 22, 2012, six scientists and one civil servant were convicted of manslaughter for failing to properly warn the people of L’Aquila, Italy, of an impending earthquake that resulted in over 300 deaths and 1,500 injuries. This article investigates a key event leading up to this conviction: An emergency meeting of scientists, civil servants, and politicians to determine whether or not an advanced warning should be issued to the residents of L’Aquila. The following investigation of this emergency meeting uses functional stasis analysis to identify the primary breakdown in deliberation that ultimately led to a message of calm and reassurance immediately prior to the devastating earthquake. The results provide insights into not only the events in L’Aquila but also broader issues of risk, uncertainty, fact, and value in science-policy deliberation.

Rare are the instances wherein scientific communication occurs only in words. Pages of scientific research are littered with images, tables, figures, and data displays. From the anatomical drawings...