This article argues that academic manuscript review is a site for activism, using Anzaldúa’s theory of conocimiento as a framework to contextualize the reviewer’s role in this process. It demonstrates that conocimiento provides a structure for engaging in the manuscript-review process in a way that mediates among potentially conflicting worldviews. Conocimiento informs more justice-oriented reviewing and positions the anonymous reviewer as activist. This article explores each stage of conocimiento and anonymous review through multifaceted methods: storytelling, theory, and a synthesis of the two. It ends by presenting concrete, action-based takeaways for reviewers who want to approach reviewing justly and equitably.

As the journal begins its 38th year, I am honored to take the helm as editor of a publication that not only conveys cutting-edge research but also serves as a vehicle for helping us to reimagine th...

This article reports findings from a month-long research project in Vietnam working with the Vietnam Association for Victims of Agent Orange (VAVA). The authors found that VAVA did not always abide Western prescriptions for “good” technical and scientific communication yet were extremely effective technical communicators among victims and families. This article reports findings that call for an expanded definition of what it means to practice good technical communication, especially in understudied cultural contexts.

This article calls for recognition of ways in which feminisms have, do, and can inform social justice work in technical and professional communication (TPC)—even social justice work that is not explicitly feminist. The authors distill some areas of feminist TPC scholarship that are relevant to future social justice work: (a) epistemological contributions, ways of knowing and methods for discovering them and (b) reclamations of dominant topics, groundwork laid by feminist research on technology and science. They close with nine recommendations to inspire scholars with specific ways to use feminist methodologies and theories to enhance social justice scholarship.

Technical and professional communication (TPC), like human-centered design, has long been human centric. But TPC struggles with the complexities of determining which humans are at the center of our work. This article proposes that an explicit consideration of human dignity and human rights can help us to navigate these complexities by reflecting upon whether our work harmonizes with the notion that every person has intrinsic worth. To illustrate, I present findings from exploratory research with nonelite Rwandan youth in which participants conveyed the roles and effects of technology-mediated communication and information and communication technology in their lives. I assert that as TPC begins engaging more explicitly with human dignity and human rights, we should adopt a perspective inspired by human-centered design scholar Richard Buchanan: embracing human dignity and human rights as the first principle of communication and the foundational value of the TPC field.

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.

Community-based research in technical communication is well suited to supporting empowerment and developing contextualized understandings, but this research is messy. Presenting fieldwork examples from an interdisciplinary technical communication/medical anthropology study in Rwanda, this article conveys challenges that the authors encountered during fieldwork and their efforts to turn the messy constraints of community-based research into openings. Explicitly considering values and validity provided a strategy for our efforts to democratically share power, maximize rigor, and navigate uncertainty.

Technical communication increasingly occurs in distributed, cross-cultural, and cross-organizational environments in which stakeholders may have widely disparate—even conflicting—perspectives. Information and communication technology for development (ICTD) is one such environment. Balancing complex and conflicting perspectives of multiple stakeholder groups is a challenge, and unstable stakeholder participation is a widespread problem in ICTD projects. The study presented here shows that stakeholders’ participation in a project was sustained most easily when the value that the stakeholders would gain from such participation was congruent with their respective national and organizational cultures. This study has implications for technical communicators working on cross-organizational projects, particularly projects that occur in distributed, cross-cultural environments.

Abstract Information and communication technology for development (ICTD) involves using information and communication technologies (ICTs) to improve the well-being of people in resource-constrained environments. Because ICTD projects involve crafting technical information and the ICTs that convey it, ICTD involves challenges familiar to technical communicators, such as balancing stakeholder interests and building credibility necessary to influence stakeholders. This article presents how trust and credibility affect ICTD projects, describing implications for development contexts and for distributed work environments. Keywords: credibilitydistributed workinformation and communication technologyresource-constrained environmentstrust ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The author would like to thank the project stakeholders who participated in this research, as well as the Microsoft Research Technology for Emerging Markets research group, M. Haselkorn, B. Kolko, C. Lee, and K. Toyama for their support of this work. Additional informationNotes on contributorsRebecca Walton Rebecca Walton is an assistant professor at Utah State University. Her research explores how human and contextual factors affect the design and use of information and communication technologies in resource-constrained environments.