User experience (UX) as both a vocation and a skillset is currently in the center of a wicked knot: emerging technologies such as generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) and large language models (LLMs) are (for the moment) widely accessible in unprecedented ways and are already heavily integrated into modern workplace practices and educational spaces. Further, workplace demands have led to a change in perception of the function and value of UX, and the field is facing new obstacles to hiring and research funding. Our article argues that a resituation of UX is needed: we-as instructors and administrators-need to focus on UX as an act of slow, embodied, and multimodal UX composition. To do this work, we offer the strategy of détournement as central to UX curriculum and preparing students for design work in a variety of rhetorical situations, expressed through our example assignments for instructors to implement within the college classroom.

This article reports on lessons learned from the first phase of an ongoing multimodal project aimed at promoting digital and environmental literacy in concert with access and accessibility on our university's main campus. We discuss an emerging, student-led locative media project, built to increase engagement with the North Woods, an approximately 300 acre parcel of unmanaged forests and wetlands on the north part of our campus. By layering together deep mapping and accessibility, this project intervenes in the binaries between art and science and nature and technology, with a strong focus on how digital, environmental, and community literacy can contribute to more accessible experiences.

This article reports on lessons learned from the first phase of an ongoing multimodal project aimed at promoting digital and environmental literacy in concert with access and accessibility on our university's main campus. We discuss an emerging, student-led locative media project, built to increase engagement with the North Woods, an approximately 300 acre parcel of unmanaged forests and wetlands on the north part of our campus. By layering together deep mapping and accessibility, this project intervenes in the binaries between art and science and nature and technology, with a strong focus on how digital, environmental, and community literacy can contribute to more accessible experiences.

Nine people with mental health diagnoses wrote a dialogue to discuss how we navigate our conditions and ask for accommodations within an academic setting. We cogitate on the challenges of obtaining a diagnosis, how and when we disclose, the affordances and challenges of our symptoms, seeking accommodations, and advocating for ourselves. We consider how current scholarship and other perspectives are changing the conversation about mental health in the academy. We conclude that while the 2008 revisions to the Americans with Disabilities Act have addressed necessary accommodations, that those with mental health conditions are still seeking access.

Recently, educators have created crowdsourced syllabi using social media. Activist syllabi are digitally circulated public collections of knowledge and knowledge-making about events and social movements. As technical communicators, we can function as curators of public intellectualism by providing accessibility and usability guidance for these activist syllabi in collaboration with activist syllabi creators. In turn, technical communicators can work with syllabi creators as a coalitional social justice strategy to enhance the circulation of these activist syllabi.

Using interactive digital maps is now common practice for most universities. Increasingly, more users are introduced to their academic workplaces through online content such as Google Street View and virtual tours. Students with disabilities depend on environmental information to navigate the barriers they face on campus. While most webmasters for postsecondary institutions in the United States know their legal obligations for accommodation in the delivery of web content, legal conformance does not necessarily reflect awareness for social or spatial considerations in the design of campus digital maps. This study discusses an accessibility audit and content analysis of these interactive maps.

Employing Royster and Kirsch's (2012) concept of critical imagination, the authors imagine strategies communication designers might use to intervene in and disrupt racial injustice and oppression. Using activity trackers as technologies that communicate data about health and death, the authors retell and re-envision the case of Eric Garner, a victim of police brutality, and argue that data from activity trackers can potentially be used to reframe narratives about public health and policing. Further, through an examination of the rhetorical frames of dehumanization, disbelief, and dissociation, the authors assert that activity trackers, as communicative agents, may become transformative wearable devices that are developed and deployed with socially just communication design in mind.