This case examines how functionalist approaches manifest culturally based on users’ contexts. The authors conduct a critical visual semiotic analysis of the race and Hispanic origin questions on the 2010 U.S. Census form, demonstrating how incongruities in design potentially harm people. This demonstrates a need for adding critical analyses to design and research and it refocuses the Society for Technical Communication’s value of promoting the public good on to design and documentation in order to fight injustice.

In this rhetorical analysis based on the Foucaultian constructs of power in medicine, specifically the docile body, the medical gaze, and health consumerism, the authors examine ways the pharmaceutical industry used web-based direct-to-consumer advertising, from 2007-2010, to craft interactions between U.S. consumers and physicians in ways that changed the traditional patient-physician relationship in order to drive sales of brand-name therapeutic drugs. We demonstrate how the pharmaceutical industry uses its websites to script power relationships between patients and physicians in order to undermined physician authority and empower patients to become healthcare consumers. We speculate that this shift minimizes or even erases dialogue, diagnosis, and consideration of medical expertise. We suggest that if it is important to uphold values of the modern version of the hippocratic oath, it may be necessary to provide physicians and patients additional parts in the script so that medical decisions are made based on sound science, knowledge, and experience.

This article presents a critical, new historical analysis of the 2010 U.S. Census form. The authors demonstrate that the Hispanic origin and race questions, as currently formulated, imply a “double occupancy of Hispanics” that serves a dual function: to simultaneously monitor the Hispanic population growth and inflate the white count by incorporating Hispanics into the white racial category. This double occupancy of Hispanics results in skewed data analyses that support specific political agendas and ultimately produce racial inequities.

The purpose of this project was to explore and document one approach for integrating social media--Facebook, really--into freshman writing. The assignment using Facebook was first given in 2006 and twice more through 2009. Our report on the project takes the form of a network; the content is distributed across the wall, info, and notes sections of the narrator profile, The Facebook Papers, as well as across the pages of all of the authors.

Using the data collected by the CCCC Committee on the Major, the authors demonstrate how quickly the writing major is growing, map the commonalities among various majors, discuss some of the problems in developing a major, and raise questions about what a writing major should be.