Non-formal learning institutions use interpretive plans to create effective interpretation (mission-based communications) for their visitors. This article argues that interpretive planning offers professional and technical communicators great potential for engaging with communities. Following an introduction to the field of interpretation and interpretive planning, I explain how interpretive plans are a type of metagenre. I then provide technical communicators with specific examples of how technical communicators’ expertise is relevant to interpretation.

As technical communication (TC) instructors, it is vital that we continue reimagining our curricula as the field itself is continually reimagined in light of new technologies, genres, workplace practices, and theories—theories such as those from disability studies scholarship. Here, the authors offer an approach to including disability studies in TC curricula through the inclusion of a “critical accessibility case study” (CACS). In explicating the theoretical and practical foundations that support teaching a CACS in TC courses, the authors provide an overview of how TC scholars have productively engaged with disability studies and case studies to question both our curricular content and classroom practices. They offer as an example their “New York City Evacuation CACS,” developed for and taught in TC for Health Sciences courses, which demonstrates that critical disability theory can help us better teach distribution and design of technical information and user-based approaches to TC. The conceptual framework of the CACS functions as a strategy for TC instructors to integrate disability studies and attention to disability and accessibility into TC curricula, meeting both ethical calls to do so as well as practical pedagogical goals.

Philip Eubanks’s The Troubled Rhetoric and Communication of Climate Change: The Argumentative Situation is the first book-length treatment of climate change by a scholar of rhetoric. As such, it fi...

The authors performed an interdisciplinary literature review of research on communication and climate change. The authors reviewed STEM, social science, and risk analysis journals to synthesize recent publications on climate change communication which could support research in technical communication. Several applications are proposed for technical communication research, including using this review to contextualize local qualitative work, to spur interdisciplinary projects and address gaps in multidisciplinary literature, and reconsider a role for advocacy in technical communication.