Image-based methods hold promise for reaching community-based, social justice goals in TPC. As a research example illustrates, however, participants can mold such methods in ways not anticipated by typical protocols that emphasize pre-prepared photos and public activism. By reflexively analyzing how participants shaped an image-based study through an embodied posthumanist lens, I propose a more inclusive “living visual-voice” model useful for TPC projects aiming to affect social change, increase participant/community involvement, and study material-discursive-embodied interactions.

Drawing from literature on communication as a physical, material experience, this article expands Cargile Cook’s “layered literacies” (2002) pedagogical framework to include a seventh literacy—embodied literacy. The article uses a classroom case study in which students coproduced a cookbook with low-income, elderly, disabled users, to demonstrate how students can become more responsible and effective technical communicators by recognizing users’ divergent embodied experiences. The article includes suggestions for concrete classroom practices that encourage such embodied literacy.

Building on current theories of rhetorical agency, this essay analyzes two metaphors for aging found in public health information materials targeted to the elderly—aging is ageless and aging is pathology—concerning how these metaphors frame agency for older adults. The metaphors attribute limited agency to older adults by emphasizing short-term, biomedical solutions and expert knowledge and by not representing agency as situational, dynamic, and co-constructed. Exploring the limits of these metaphors both further exposes how public health discourse shapes the cultural perception of aging and offers an expanded understanding of older adults as dynamic rhetorical agents.