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.

A new way of thinking about data science and data ethics that is informed by the ideas of intersectional feminism. Today, data science is a form of power. It has been used to expose injustice, improve health outcomes, and topple governments. But it has also been used to discriminate, police, and surveil. This potential for good, on the one hand, and harm, on the other, makes it essential to ask: Data science by whom? Data science for whom? Data science with whose interests in mind? The narratives around big data and data science are overwhelmingly white, male, and techno-heroic. In Data Feminism, Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren Klein present a new way of thinking about data science and data ethics—one that is informed by intersectional feminist thought. Illustrating data feminism in action, D'Ignazio and Klein show how challenges to the male/female binary can help challenge other hierarchical (and empirically wrong) classification systems. They explain how, for example, an understanding of emotion can expand our ideas about effective data visualization, and how the concept of invisible labor can expose the significant human efforts required by our automated systems. And they show why the data never, ever “speak for themselves.” Data Feminism offers strategies for data scientists seeking to learn how feminism can help them work toward justice, and for feminists who want to focus their efforts on the growing field of data science. But Data Feminism is about much more than gender. It is about power, about who has it and who doesn't, and about how those differentials of power can be challenged and changed.

Equipping Technical Communicators for Social Justice Work provides action-focused resources and tools—heuristics, methodologies, and theories—for scholars to enact social justice. These resources support the work of scholars and practitioners in conducting research and teaching classes in socially just ways. Each chapter identifies a tool, highlights its relevance to technical communication, and explains how and why it can prepare technical communication scholars for socially just work. For the field of technical and professional communication to maintain its commitment to this work, how social justice intersects with inclusivity through UX, technological, civic, and legal literacies, as well as through community engagement, must be acknowledged. Equipping Technical Communicators for Social Justice Work will be of significance to established scholar-teachers and graduate students, as well as to newcomers to the field. Contributors: Kehinde Alonge, Alison Cardinal, Erin Brock Carlson, Oriana Gilson, Laura Gonzales, Keith Grant-Davie, Angela Haas, Mark Hannah, Kimberly Harper, Sarah Beth Hopton, Natasha Jones, Isidore Kafui Dorpenyo, Liz Lane, Emily Legg, Nicole Lowman, Kristen Moore, Emma Rose, Fernando Sanchez, Jennifer Sano-Franchini, Adam Strantz, Cana Uluak Itchuaqiyaq, Josephine Walwema, Miriam Williams, Han Yu

"This book traces the long arc of Black women's relationship with technology from the antebellum south to the social media era demonstrating how digital culture transforms and is transformed by Black feminist thought"--

The purpose of this cutting-edge collection of essays is threefold: first, it presents the principles of data collection and interpretation or the methodological distinctions of a particular method appropriate to technical communication research. Second, it discusses the foundational principles of the methodologies given the primary discipline in which they were created and applied. Finally, it reflects upon the process of importing and employing these methodologies into the research field of technical communication, and on how technical communication research has contributed to the development and application of these methodologies. Written by many noted scholars in the field and presenting a wide range of research methods, Research in Technical Communication combines theory and practice. Both technical communicators and industry researchers who want to learn more about workplace research and methodologies will find it invaluable, as will beginning and advanced scholars, who will find much that is useful in its variety of subjects.

This book has two audiences and purposes. The first audience comprises teachers of technical communication and graduate and undergraduate students, commonly from English programs and without technical backgrounds. The purpose for them is to introduce technical communication from the avenue of humanities with which many are familiar and allied. The book serves them as an adjunct to conventional textbooks. The second audience comprises scholars and practicing professionals already familiar with technical communication. The purpose for them is to provide a handy collection, with introduction, of significant essays on recent humanistic developments.

Gender in Applied Communication Contexts explores the intersection and integration of feminist theory as applied to four important areas: organizational communication, health communication, family communication, and instructional communication. This collection of readings links theoretical insights and contributions to pragmatic ways of improving the lives of women and men in a variety of professional and personal situations. Gender in Applied Communication Contexts is recommended for upper-division and graduate-level courses in gender and communication, feminist theory, organizational communication, health communication, instructional communication, and applied communication. This anthology is also recommended as a research resource for scholars in Women's Studies, Family Studies, and Business and Management.