This article examines how technical communicators, specifically concerned with the overlap between design, community, and security logics, can better understand how certain ideals around security, surveillance and safety can reinforce or resist narratives about state-sponsored protections. We use the public and political controversy surrounding the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center (Cop City) as a backdrop for engaging the questions regarding technical communicators potential for intervening into unjust security logics that impact the environment and marginalized communities.

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 this article, we ask what it means to think of infrastructure discursively through situational analysis. First, we consider how policymakers have historically used writing and rhetoric to redefine, reframe, and resituate what infrastructure can be in technical documents. Second, we address the impact of policymakers' discursive practices on the spaces and material realities of communities. We view the infrastructural function of writing "as a conceptual foundation for revealing structures and foundations of organizations that affect people" (Read, 2019, p. 237). We use three texts as the space of our discourse mapping: President Franklin Roosevelt's "Fireside Chat on the Recovery Program," the Green New Deal, and President Joseph Biden's recently proposed American Jobs Plan. Through these three cases, we argue that infrastructure has always been defined in relation to environment. Any definition of infrastructure is rooted in environment or seeks to change environment. These shifts in definition have been used strategically to bring more visibility to marginalized communities and make their concerns central to the concerns of the United States' socio-economic agenda. We close with implications for both communities and policymakers.

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.

This article advocates for a contrasting Value Sensitive Design (VSD) framework based on principles of environmental justice, which encourages environmental-sensing wearable developers to make their values apparent to users in their designs in order to transform users into researchers rather than passive data collectors; make technological systems more transparent rather than opaque; and connect users to larger networks of individuals, who share common justice-oriented goals.

This essay responds to recent exigencies that ask scholars to honor histories of cultural rhetorics, engage in responsible and responsive cultural rhetorics conversations, and generate productive openings for future inquiry and practice. First, the authors open by paying homage to scholarship and programs that have made cultural rhetorics a disciplinary home. Next, they consider the varied ways in which “culture” and “rhetoric” interface in cultural rhetorics scholarship. The authors provide case studies of how cultural rhetorics inquiry shapes their scholarship across areas of rhetoric, composition, and technical communication. Finally, they close by discussing the ethics of doing cultural rhetorics work.

This article describes graduate mentorship experiences at the Writing, Information, and Digital Experience (WIDE) research center at Michigan State University and offers a stance on graduate student mentorship. It describes WIDE’s mentorship model as feminist and inclusive and as a means to invite researchers with different backgrounds to engage in knowledge-making activities and collaborate on projects. Additionally, the article explains how WIDE enables growth for its researchers, teachers, and leaders. To illustrate these ideas, the authors provide multiple perspectives across faculty mentors, former graduate students, and current graduate students in order to discuss how WIDE researchers practice mentorship and how this mentorship prepares students for future work as scholars and researchers. Finally, the article suggests ways other research centers can adapt WIDE’s approach to their own institutional context.