The purpose of this book is to move our field's discussion beyond issues of diversity in the practice of technical communication, which is certainly important, to include discussions of how race and ethnicity inform the production and distribution of technical communication in the United States. Equally important, this book is an attempt to uncover those communicative practices used to adversely affect historically marginalized groups and identify new practices that can be used to encourage cultural competence within institutions and communities. This book, like our field, is an interdisciplinary effort. While all authors have taught or practiced technical communication, their backgrounds include studies in technical communication, rhetoric and composition, creative writing, and higher education. For the sake of clarity, the book is organized into five sections: historical representations of race and ethnicity in health and science communication; social justice and activism in technical communication; considerations of race and ethnicity in social media; users' right to their own language; and communicating identity across borders, cultures, and disciplines.

Feminist Technical Communication introduces readers to technical communication methodology, demonstrating how rhetorical feminist approaches are vital to the future of technical communication. Using an intersectional and transcultural approach, Erin Clark fuses the well-documented surge of work in feminist technical communication throughout the 1990s with the larger social justice turn in the discipline. The first book to situate feminisms and technical communication in relationship as the focal point, Feminist Technical Communication traces the thread of feminisms through technical communication’s connection to social justice studies. Clark theorizes “slow crisis,” a concept made readable to technical communicators by apparent feminisms that can help technical communicators readily recognize and address social justice problems. Clark then applies this framework to the Deepwater Horizon Disaster, an extended crisis that has been publicly framed by a traditional view of efficiency that privileges economic impact. Through rich description of apparent feminist information-gathering techniques and a layered analysis this study offers application far beyond this single disaster, making available new crisis-response possibilities that consider the economy without eliding ecological and human health concerns. Feminist Technical Communication offers a methodological approach to the systematic interrogation of power structures that operate on hidden misogynies. This book is useful to technical communicators, scholars of technical communication and rhetoric, and readers interested in gender studies and public health and is an ideal text for graduate-level seminars focused on feminisms, social justice, and cultural studies.

As technical communicators continue advocating for justice, the field should pay closer attention to how language diversity shapes all research and praxis in contemporary global contexts. Designing Multilingual Experiences in Technical Communication provides frameworks, strategies, and best practices for researchers engaging in projects with multilingual communities. Through grounded case studies of multilingual technical communication projects in the US, Mexico, and Nepal, Laura Gonzales illustrates the multiple tensions at play in transnational research and demonstrates how technical communicators can leverage contemporary translation practices and methodologies to engage in research with multilingual communities that is justice-driven, participatory, and reciprocal. Designing Multilingual Experiences in Technical Communication is of value to researchers and students across fields who are interested in designing projects alongside multilingual communities from historically marginalized backgrounds.

Drawing on social justice methodologies and cultural studies scholarship, Key Theoretical Frameworks offers new curricular and pedagogical approaches to teaching technical communication. Including original essays by emerging and established scholars, the volume educates students, teachers, and practitioners on identifying and assessing issues of social justice and globalization. The collection provides a valuable resource for teachers new to translating social justice theories to the classroom by presenting concrete examples related to technical communication. Each contribution adopts a particular theoretical approach, explains the theory, situates it within disciplinary scholarship, contextualizes the approach from the author’s experience, and offers additional teaching applications. The first volume of its kind, Key Theoretical Frameworks links the theoretical with the pedagogical in order to articulate, use, and assess social justice frameworks for designing and teaching courses in technical communication. Contributors: Godwin Y. Agboka, Matthew Cox, Marcos Del Hierro, Jessica Edwards, Erin A. Frost, Elise Verzosa Hurley, Natasha N. Jones, Cruz Medina, Marie E. Moeller, Kristen R. Moore, Donnie Johnson Sackey, Gerald Savage, J. Blake Scott, Barbi Smyser-Fauble, Kenneth Walker, Rebecca Walton

Using qualitative research data on Mexican/Mexican Americans and their historias de éxito that center on Mexican centric concepts such as buen trabajador, bien educado, and buena gente, Octavio Pimentel reveals that when social networks guide personal goals in these communities, goals become community-oriented rather than personally-oriented.

This is the first scholarly monograph marking the social justice turn in technical and professional communication (TPC). Social justice often draws attention to structural oppression, but to enact social justice as technical communicators, first, we must be able to trace daily practice to the oppressive structures it professionalizes, codifies, and normalizes. Technical Communication After the Social Justice Turn moves readers from conceptual explorations of oppression and justice to a theoretical framework that allows for the concepts to be applied and implemented in a variety of practical contexts. It historicizes the recent social justice turn in TPC scholarship, models a social justice approach to building theories and heuristics, and presents scenarios that illustrate how to develop sustainable practices of activism and social justice. Its commitment to coalition building, inclusivity, and socially just practices of citation and activism will support scholars, teachers, and practitioners not only in understanding how the work of technical communication is often complicit in oppression but also in recognizing, revealing, rejecting, and replacing oppressive practices.