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.

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.

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Using cultural empowerment as a conceptual framework, this study emphasizes the interrelated role of culture, rhetorical agency, and empowerment in discursive analysis and communicative practice. Twelve black business owners were interviewed using a narrative inquiry approach. Thematic analysis revealed that these entrepreneurs enacted rhetorical agency in ways that work within oppressive systems and resisted damaging dominate discourses about black businesses. By highlighting the rhetorical narratives of black entrepreneurs, this study also addresses the need for a more culturally sensitive approach in business, professional, and organizational communication.

Human-centered design is a burgeoning field of study that has the potential to work toward actively creating more just and equitable technology design while critically interrogating the design process. To do this, human-centered design needs to consider making social justice aims a primary objective and end-goal in design. One way of integrating social justice aims into design is to employ the use of narrative inquiry. This article explores an alternative method for developing design scenarios using narrative inquiry and the feminist concepts of silence and voice as a way to promote considerations of social justice and inclusion in design. Using narrative inquiry to rethink certain aspects of the design process can help designers address issues of agency. The methodological focus of this article responds to Suchman’s call for “alternative visions” of how technology production and design can be undertaken.

This article presents an antenarrative of the field of technical and professional communication. Part methodology and part practice, an antenarrative allows the work of the field to be reseen, forges new paths forward, and emboldens the field’s objectives to unabashedly embrace social justice and inclusivity as part of its core narrative. The authors present a heuristic that can usefully extend the pursuit of inclusivity in technical and professional communication.

This article examines the inter-relational role of genre and narrative in a social justice organization. Employing an interdisciplinary approach, this test presents a process-centered approach using genre ecology modeling and narrative maps. This approach can help scholars understand how genre and narrative dialectically promote collaboration and coordination while simultaneously promoting the process of consubstantiality and rhetorical identification in networked organizations.

This article argues for the need for a social justice approach to technical communication research and pedagogy. Given previous calls by scholars in technical and professional communication (TPC) for an attention to diversity, inclusion, and equality, the author examines the place and purpose of social justice in TPC and provides useful approaches for promoting a more genuine and critical interrogation of how work in TPC impacts the human experience.