- #attwA3: Tactical Communication as Advocacy
Josephine Walwema, Jared S. Colton, Steve Holmes, Isidore Kafui Dorpenyo
In summer 2014, following the death of Michael Brown at the hands of a Ferguson Police Officer, protests erupted on the streets, making national and international headlines. While mainstream news focused on violent spectacles, news coverage largely ignored the important role played by technical documents such as gasmask construction instructions circulated in print and social media. In response, this panel will analyze tactical technical communication as advocacy in the case of the 2014 Ferguson protests by offering three extensions of Miles Kimball’s (2006) notion of “tactical technical communication.” The panel’s primary contribution to investigations of tactical technical communication as advocacy include exploring how tactics can supplement existing work on social justice (Agboka, 2013; Jones and Walton, 2015; Leydons, 2013; Savage and Mattson, 2011) through examining the important role of unofficial or non-sanctioned technical documents that enable activist practices. In general, the presenters highlight the value of technical communications’ research methodologies for examining how activist spaces are composed through a variety of actors, spaces, goals, motives, and even material objects.
- #attwB2: Online Medical Forums, Health Controversies, and the Role of Advocacy
Abigail Bakke, Jennifer Fierke, L. Elizabeth Mackey, Meenakshi Venkat
E-health allows patients unprecedented access to technical medical information online. It has been praised by some as a tool for patients’ self-advocacy and criticized by others as a source of misinformation or anxiety. Technical communication scholars have often discussed e-health in terms of ethical design or the complexity of the patient audience (Koerber & Still, 2008; Kopelson, 2009; Segal, 2009). However, because patients now also contribute medical information online via patient forums, looking at the networked elements of credibility, trust, patient advocacy, and risk is increasingly important. This panel features three case studies of patients in online health forums engaged in everyday examples of technical communication (Durack, 1997). Collectively, their findings suggest that e-health patients act as what presenters call “citizen technical communicators” who collaboratively negotiate risk, assign credibility to fellow patients or moderators, and resituate medical language within the context of their illness. The panel further suggests that e-patients engage in complex and technical information exchanges, which deserves as much critical attention from our field as formal, professional communication.
There are also three tweets about the #womeninTC luncheon at the end of this! If you're curious.
- #attwC3: Service Learning as an Advocacy Tool
Eric James Stephens, Katie Yankura Swacha, Anirban Ray, Rhonda Stanton
As mentioned in my notes for this panel, I had to skip out halfway through. I included a screencap of Stephens's description in the notes themselves, so here is the description for Swacha's:
Feminist technical communication scholars have argued for the field to research rhetorics not traditionally deemed ‘technical’ in order to 1) highlight women’s contributions to technical writing, 2) challenge the binaristic thinking that divides ‘public’ and ‘private’ writing, and 3) recognize the embodied experiences of technical communicators, students, and users (e.g. Seigel, 2014; Durack, 1997). This paper builds on this call, arguing that important advocacy work in technical communication can begin in communities and with genres not traditionally engaged in the field. Specifically, the paper details a service-learning project in which technical writing students collaborated with disadvantaged seniors at a local senior center to research, write, and publish a cookbook tailored for older, food insecure users. Building from Marika Seigel’s work (2014) on pregnancy manuals, the paper argues that cookbooks are a technical genre that situates users within the technological system of food distribution and public health. By assuming that users have access to fresh ingredients and the physical and technological capacity to cook, many cookbooks neglect older users experiencing food insecurity, poverty, and/or disabilities. To address this issue, technical writing students collaborated with such users at a local senior center to produce a cookbook that combines users’ personal recipes with rhetorical principles of usability and design. The resulting cookbook better 1) enables users to navigate food systems and public health rhetorics, 2) considers and supports users’ embodied experiences within those systems, and 3) blurs the lines between public/private writing. The cookbook also functioned as an advocacy document by helping the senior center to raise local awareness on food insecurity and aging. By detailing both the successes and challenges of this project, this paper argues for more advocacy work that can expand the definition of technical communication, recognize users’ embodied forms of expertise, and contribute to grassroots, community-driven initiatives.
- #attwD7: Advocacy in the Curriculum
Morgan Gresham, Roxanne Aftanas, Teddi Fishman
We issue a challenge to the field of technical communication and ourselves as teachers, to consider knowledge making from a variety of perspectives, to unhinge privilege by moving beyond binary thinking often found in scientific and technical communication: “secrecy/disclosure, knowledge/ignorance, private/public, masculine/feminine, majority/minority, natural/artificial, new/old, domestic/foreign, and health/illness” (Sedgwick, 11). In this panel we will describe three ways we are working to meet this challenge ourselves.
And that's it for the year! I am probably going to keep alternating between ATTW and the IWCA Collaboratory, so look for more ATTW tweets from me in...2018? Eep.
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