In place of (or as a complement to) “user experience research,” we propose “reader experience research” as a technique for tracing how contemporary readers make meaning through a host of social-semiotic modes. Significantly, such modes are always already conditioned by cognitive, social, economic, and technological factors. To illustrate how reader experience research can account for such factors, we describe the emergence of our institution’s Reader Experience Lab. We illustrate through three experiences how the lab (and reader experience research, in general) offers opportunities for gaining insight into how contemporary readers make meaning in and/or despite what Dan Keller terms a “culture of acceleration.”

The CIA's Operation PBSuccess represents a pivotal moment in Cold War securitization that illuminates technical communication's role in security contexts. We use Haas and Frost's apparent decolonial feminist (ADF) rhetoric of risk to trace how communicators mediated security logics across cultures and networks while exploiting technological asymmetries between the US and Guatemala. Building on theories of risk and (in)security framing, we demonstrate how the scriptwriters and hosts of Radio Liberación , as technical communicators, functioned as security actors complicit in the decades-long aftermath. We conclude by calling on technical communicators to approach risk communication through continued decolonial praxis.