Technical Communication Quarterly

This methodologies and approaches article discusses an undergraduate journal in a technical editing undergraduate course as a location to leverage a social justice curriculum. The Undergraduate Journal of Contemporary Issues and Media is a student-run journal that is at the center of learning about technical editing while facilitating diversity and inclusion. The article demonstrates how students can promote social justice by working with authors to edit texts as allies and activists.

This article explores the instructional design practices of three female artificial intelligence tech influencers (AITIs) who use YouTube to teach coding and professional literacies. Our thematic analysis of nine video transcripts featuring generative AI (GAI) yielded themes centered on influencers’ persona development, flexible instructional methods, opportunities for application, and GAI limitations. We conclude the article by identifying a utilitarian ethical dilemma wherein AITIs avoid overt feminist arguments to reach a broader audience.

This qualitative, triple case study reveals how policy reports function as enduring rhetorical resources beyond publication. Textual-intertextual analysis of three antimicrobial resistance reports—including 23 interviews and more than 700 related texts—illuminates how the reports enable subsequent persuasion by filling information gaps, supplying authoritative citations, and representing landmarks. Leveraging theories of circulation, recomposition, and extended delivery, the article offers heuristics to help writers design reports that better equip others to argue in policy contexts over time.

This article examines intergenerational succession in a rural nonprofit as a form of tactical technical and professional communication (TPC). Drawing on ethnographic research, it shows how leaders sustain organizational continuity through documentation, meetings, leadership development, and historical interpretation. Known locally as “storying the process,” these practices layer narrative, relational, and procedural work. The article argues that TPC genres gain meaning through situated, intergenerational labor, contributing to TPC scholarship on storytelling and socially just communication in community-based contexts.

Technical and professional communication (TPC) scholars are increasingly critical of the complex relations between surveillance, power, and technologies, particularly how those relations reinforce ...

The first yearbook of the Michigan College of Mines (1915–1916) included a feature about the short-lived student drama club, the “Micomi Club” (1911–1914). It was ending because male students could no longer play female characters: “no mining engineer could be a lady.” Using historical case study methods, this article argues that the yearbook feature demonstrates, in content, worries about the destabilizing potential of drag performance and, in form, the uses of humor in technical writing.

Cross-institutional research of pedagogy in the technical and professional communication classroom is needed to understand social justice teaching across multiple contexts. This collective case study discusses social justice-focused assignments given by eight instructors at different institutions. Results show that institutions with more diverse populations may have advantages in making social justice power differentials salient. Further, teacher positionality impacts the degree of social justice content incorporated.

This study examines the rhetorical endeavors of a grassroots citizen and a youth activist in addressing official ignorance and denial surrounding the Flint water crisis. These civic participants engaged in extensive communicative, interactive, and affective labor to assess and communicate risks, raising public awareness and pushing for policy change. This article theorizes an extended materialist social justice framework by illustrating the complex interactions between immaterial labor and different types of social justice.

This article is the result of a multiyear collaboration between a tech comm professor, agricultural education faculty, an Extension agent, and 12 producers, and explores agritourism as a form of tactical technical communication (TTC), whereby agricultural producers advocate for themselves and their communities through communication about complex food systems with farm visitors. Through interviews, surveys, and observations, we learned what forms of TTC producers are already doing, what research is needed, and what our next steps need to be in supporting their communication goals with regard to agritourism. Our research offers key insights for technical communication practitioners working in Extension or in other capacities where they may be able to train producers, park rangers, or subject-matter experts in other fields who may not yet regard themselves as technical communicators, but who are poised to practice TTC with an attentive audience.