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This case study examines how technical communication students used generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in user-experience (UX) design via Figma. Over a semester, they engaged with Figma Jambot, AI plug-ins, and other GenAI tools. Reporting on the findings from students’ individual and team reflections, the authors explore how students used AI-assistance in UX work. Using activity theory's knotworking, the authors study how students articulate GenAI as object, tool, genre, text, and person. In functioning as a boundary object, AI helped to coordinate team workflows and translate design ideas. Then students employed rework strategies to refine designs. Finally, the authors reflect on implications for AI-assisted UX design as a cocreative process.

This study examines how design thinking (DT) can function as a conceptual and analytical framework for supporting students’ critical AI literacy practices in writing and technical communication classrooms. Drawing on focus group interviews, individual reflection essays, and design artifacts from undergraduate technical writing students who collaboratively designed and customized AI chatbots using Poe, the study explores how students enacted responsible and user-centered design practices through each stage of the DT process. Findings reveal that 1) the empathize and define stages helped students identify algorithmic biases and frame inclusivity as part of user-centered design; 2) the ideate and prototype stages translated critical awareness into design decisions around prompt engineering, knowledge base curation, and visual accessibility; and 3) the test stage allowed students to revise their chatbot design through iterative usability testing and user feedback. Collectively, the DT process positioned students as human-in-the-loop co-creators who exercised rhetorical agency through prompt design, knowledge curation, and bias mitigation while designing customized chatbots. The article ends with pedagogical implications for integrating DT into critical AI pedagogy, chatbot design, and composition instruction.

To illustrate how environmental aesthetics shape present-day science communication pedagogy, this article situates contemporary science communication in the context of the American environmental writing tradition, drawing from the field reporting techniques of William Bartram as a form of artist's study. We use teaching case examples to demonstrate how the aesthetic experience of scientific knowledge—the acts of etching, visiting, feeling, and being in nature—ultimately contributes to better practices and pedagogy for technical illustrations, as well as more accessible entry points for scientific and technical communicators and their audiences. We present such examples of field-based writing, visualization, and multimodal projects from an undergraduate environmental writing course and a graduate science writing course to locate the role of aesthetics in natural history and contemporary science communication, contributing to a deeper engagement with the field's interdisciplinary history.

This article examines how aesthetic design and anthropomorphism support public engagement with complex environmental issues through “Blue,” a character developed for a community-based water education initiative in Arizona. Drawing on qualitative usability-testing data, the study analyzes user responses to Blue's design. We argue that Blue's effectiveness stems from his construction as a social presence and identify four design functions that shaped engagement: building approachability, leveraging recognition, using contextual credibility, and employing coordinated aesthetics. These functions form the B.L.U.E. framework, a transferable model for how anthropomorphic design can shape identification, reduce anxiety, and sustain engagement with technical content.

As generative AI systems saturate our digital spaces with an unprecedented volume of content, aesthetics (features that elicit human cognitive and sensory responses) and taste (human discernment about the quality and desirability of those features) have drawn renewed cultural attention. For researchers in scientific and technical communication (STC), this resurgence of interest might be viewed as an invitation to revisit the aesthetic as central to the ways that technical artifacts make meaning and produce subjects.

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 ...

Zine scholarship in technical communication does not often engage with aesthetics. This article argues that Yapp's queer aesthetics can be used in technical communication to shift perspectives. Through an analysis of the zine ProMomme: A Sex Worker's Guide to Parenting, I argue that queer aesthetics is used to bridge the gap between a societal impulse to consider sex work aberrant and the need for destigmatization by engaging a “traditional” vintage aesthetic with queer/stigmatized images to teach others how to talk about sex work. This juxtaposition helps create an intimacy and queer aesthetic that challenges dominant narratives that cause stigmatization, oppression, and violence against sex workers.

The sonic aesthetics of technical communication have been underconsidered compared to their visual and textual counterparts. We highlight the aesthetic overlaps and contrasts between human-produced audio technical communication and Generative AI audio that mimics the aesthetic patterns of successful science communication podcasts, specifically Radiolab , while exploring the sonic dimensions of ethos, relatability, trust, and narrative. Applying close listening analysis, we explore two particular sonic aesthetic features: prosodic variation and shared conversational syntax. We argue prosodic range and shared syntax contribute to the aesthetics of either overarching agreeableness/certainty or confrontation/uncertainty, which in turn constitutes an orientation to scientific knowledge.

The visual design of municipal websites contributes to their usability and user experience and shapes citizens’ first impressions of local governments. Visual complexity and colorfulness are two central dimensions of visual design. This study compares these dimensions across the homepages of 100 Chinese and 100 Western municipal websites. The findings show that Chinese websites are more visually complex and more colorful than Western websites. Regarding visual complexity, Chinese websites displayed more diversity and density of visual elements, less structured text organization, and more content blocks. Regarding colorfulness, they had more colors, higher saturation and brightness, and a stronger preference for red as a dominant color. Overall, the results suggest that visual design conventions in municipal websites are closely tied to linguistic, artistic, and pragmatic factors, highlighting the value of cross-cultural analysis in website design.

Skills, including piloting skills, are based on procedures (specific meanings), and these procedures can be visible in the form of expressed meanings or invisible and experienced as an embodied sense while operating out of the tacit domain as hidden implied meanings. When procedures are changed as a result of changes in airplane technology, such changes, if not made visible, can violate foundational principles of usability and catch pilots by surprise. Pilots then may experience anxiety and, operating primarily out of a low threshold of consciousness from the tacit domain, without much reflection in the form of feedback from the conscious, operate based on erroneous implied meanings rather than correct expressed meanings. Pilots should, therefore, have technical documentation concerning changes to implied meanings—through expressed meanings in the form of updated procedures and warnings—for making visible changes to implied meanings. Not providing such documentation can lead to catastrophic consequences.

<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><i>Background:</i></b> Socialization challenges for employee onboarding are well-established in management studies. This study investigates awareness of proactive socialization tactics for newly hired technical communicators. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><i>Literature review:</i></b> The review examines organizational socialization within management studies and technical communication. Literature reveals the relevance and some application of this theory to technical communicators and encourages further research. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><i>Research questions:</i></b> Do experienced professionals recognize proactive socialization tactics as a means of successful onboarding? What proactive socialization tactics do experienced professionals mention as appropriate for new technical writers? <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><i>Methodology:</i></b> Semistructured interviews were conducted with technical writers and their managers (n = 28), and transcripts were coded for instances of proactive socialization tactics (i.e., sensemaking, relationship building, and positive framing) mentioned as challenges faced by newly hired technical writers. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><i>Results and conclusion:</i></b> Participants overwhelmingly recognized proactive behaviors as valuable, mentioning sensemaking most frequently (n = 25) followed by relationship building (n = 10) and positive framing (n = 5). Results offer four actionable insights for new technical writers: 1. be proactive to move more quickly through stages of onboarding; 2. seek information and feedback by independent learning, asking questions, and volunteering; 3. build relationships through social activities; and 4. aim to frame new or less-desirable tasks positively. Research limitations included sample size, interview methodology, deductive coding, and the prominence of remote/hybrid participants. Future research could explicitly address proactive socialization tactics through surveys for a larger sample size and more generalizable findings and explore differences in tactics specific to onsite versus distributed work arrangements.

Traditional assessments of technical writing privilege final products or task outcomes and provide limited warrant for predicting writing competence across task types and workplace contexts. This article proposes a methodological shift toward process-based assessment, which evaluates the effectiveness of writers’ strategic actions during text production using observable process indicators and translates that evaluation into individualized, strategy-focused feedback benchmarked against group norms. To address alphabetic bias and genre/context blindness in keystroke logging, the article develops an integrated logging method for analyzing technical writing processes. To demonstrate feasibility and analytic affordances, it presents a case study adapting Perrin’s progression analysis for professional writing: Processes from 24 technical writers were captured and analyzed to generate performance feedback, strategy instruction, and process-based competence measures. By specifying analytic procedures, key process indicators, and principles for inferring writing competence from writing processes, this article advances process-oriented professional writing research and offers a transferable, scalable framework for workplace evaluation.

This study explores how a human-centered design (HCD) approach encourages written communication researchers to rethink methodologies when studying wicked problems, particularly in healthcare communication contexts. We argue for “methodological mutability” as a strategy to address complex and evolving challenges in rural healthcare communication. Using design thinking principles, we investigated how generative AI (GenAI) and machine learning can enhance medical communication, streamline documentation, and improve telemedicine usability. Our research revealed that rural healthcare providers view effective patient-provider communication as their primary challenge. This finding led us to pivot toward exploring how AI applications can structure and enhance patient narratives. We advocate for researchers to adopt a designer mindset, integrating methodological flexibility to move beyond problem analysis and instead develop solutions. By embedding HCD, design thinking, and methodological mutability into research design, researchers can prioritize practical interventions when working in spaces beset by wicked problems.

Virtual reality (VR) technologies are increasingly marketed to knowledge workers as productivity tools for focused, immersive work. Yet little empirical research examines the lived experience of sustained VR use for complex academic writing tasks. This study presents a 10-week diary study of a doctoral candidate using VR to compose her dissertation during summer 2025. Through weekly reflective entries, screen recordings, and artifact analysis, we examine the user experience dimensions of immersive academic writing. Our thematic analysis reveals six major findings: (1) technical infrastructure constraints dominated the writing experience; (2) embodied discomfort consistently limited sessions to 30–50 min; (3) affective dimensions shaped productivity; (4) learning curves remained steep throughout the study; (5) task type significantly influenced success, with structured administrative writing outperforming open-ended academic drafting; and (6) technical disruptions fragmented flow and made momentum recovery difficult. We argue that VR writing tools require task-appropriate design, realistic session expectations, and user agency to discontinue when needs are not met. These findings contribute user-centered evidence to technical communication scholarship on emerging composing technologies and offer practical guidance for graduate writing programs.

Communicating risk through public-facing formats like infographics is important in technical communication. Grounding our work in a collection of infographics about extreme heat risk, we argue that understanding attention and memory can help communicators make more effective design choices. This study combined eye tracking with memorability data to determine (a) what elements of infographics (text, visuals) drew attention and (b) what participants found memorable about heat risk communication. Results from our exploratory research found that student designer and community participants (1) spent less time reviewing the bottom quarter of infographics and (2) spent the majority of their time reading text but remembered visual and textual elements equally.

The hybrid exchange project described here aims to facilitate intercultural learning and cultural awareness by promoting meaningful virtual and cultural interactions among students from universities in Kenya, Ireland, and Germany. We collected qualitative data from former participants, who engaged in virtual and in-person exchanges. Our study indicates that hybrid exchange programs effectively promote intercultural understanding, and personal and professional development in technical communication. The program's design, which includes structured activities and social exchanges, contributed to the successful achievement of these goals. Such approaches can serve as a model for improving virtual team dynamics in various sectors, applicable beyond educational contexts.

Video games are forms of multimodal technical communication, conveying complicated information about game goals, mechanics, game physics, and more, to the player in a way that usually feels integrated into the game itself. This article highlights ways that games use interaction to convey information to players, classifying the communicative elements in several popular games into C.S. Pierce's classes of sign (decoratives, indicatives, and informatives). This paper asserts that technical communicators can take cues from video games to design technical communication products that better meet contemporary users’ expectations of agency and interaction—allowing them to explore and discover on their own.

This study revisits Sam Dragga’s research on ethical decision-making in document design, updating it to reflect contemporary concerns. Our findings indicate that participants today perceive the document design scenarios as significantly more unethical than those in Dragga's original study, with heightened attention to accessibility, cultural sensitivity, and social justice. While Dragga's study emphasized concerns over the consequences of document design choices, our results suggest a shift in focus toward the writer's intent. Participants frequently judged deliberate manipulation as unethical, even in cases where no direct harm was evident. These findings highlight the evolving ethical priorities in technical communication and underscore the need for practitioners and educators to reassess and revise the field's guiding principles to align with contemporary values of inclusivity and social responsibility.

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping technical communication, necessitating strategies to assess its impact. This article introduces a framework combining human-in-the-loop automation with a task-based approach for communication roles. Effective AI integration requires identifying and organizing key writing tasks to fit into automated workflows. The framework underscores the value of writing expertise and offers practical guidance for practitioners, scholars, and educators. By aligning AI tools with technical communication tasks, professionals can produce accurate and complex communication products. This approach highlights the essential role of human expertise in effective, AI-assisted writing.

This article proposes the Canon to Code (C2C) Auditing Framework for evaluating generative (artificial intelligence) AI output through classical rhetoric, arguing that AI's characteristic failures—guessing instead of knowing, politeness instead of credibility, and confidence instead of judgment—revisit problems that rhetoric has addressed since antiquity. Developed using a rulemaking methodology and drawing on classical rhetorical theory, this framework presents 10 auditing rules that operationalize rhetorical principles into evaluation criteria for AI-generated content, focusing on accuracy, transparency, and accountability. It offers content auditors, technical communicators, and compliance professionals a theoretically grounded method for distinguishing AI output that meets audience needs from output that simulates credibility through pattern matching.

How should academics who work in the field of business communication (or management, professional, or technical communication) think of their work? I propose that business communication should be understood as a sentinel discipline and a designer discipline. By sentinel discipline I mean a community that continually monitors (and responds to) changes in business practice. By designer discipline I mean a community that understands the instructional task as shaping the ways in which graduates will shape (and reshape) business organizations through their communicative behavior.

Community health practitioners face a common challenge of communicating the value of their work because it is intentionally designed to prevent health issues from happening. This case study examines how impact storytelling—a four-question framework developed by a community health manager at a nonprofit health system—mediates between technical expertise and executive's understanding. Through interviews with four Community Health practitioners, this research explains how the framework addresses specific technical communication challenges. This research brings together theory with practice by offering both a transferable framework for nonprofit organizations as well as theoretical insights into how workplace communication tools emerge from workplace practices.

After decades of proliferating digital texts, technical communication scholars and practitioners find themselves with no shortage of documents to examine. These exist in public and private repositories across a gamut of genres and used by varied audiences, communities, and organizations. As Stephen Carradini and Jason Swarts (2023) argue in Text at Scale: Corpus Analysis in Technical Communication , the "immense amount of text created by the various arms of the field of technical communication" (p. 6) makes the field ripe for a method like corpus analysis. Carradini and Swarts's efficient and approachable book acts as a timely primer on corpus analysis—the systematic study of a collection of texts—that illustrates how the method can support, complement, and extend existing research agendas and professional practices in technical communication. Assuming no prior knowledge about corpus linguistics on the part of readers, Carradini and Swarts's highly useable book may well find uptake in adjacent scholarly areas invested in the study of writing, such as composition studies or the rhetoric of science, technology, and medicine. But the chosen examples and suggested applications squarely situate Text at Scale as an indispensable volume for technical communication academics and practitioners alike.

What happens when the devices we design to assist us begin to think with us, feel with us, and even become part of us? Augmentation Technologies and Artificial Intelligence in Technical Communication: Designing Ethical Futures addresses this question by urging readers to consider not only how technologies shape our capabilities, but also how we can shape them toward more just, ethical, and human-centered futures. Much like boarding a "fast-moving train," as authors Ann Hill Duin and Isabel Pedersen describe, the book is a forward-looking volume that interrogates the technical, rhetorical, and socio-ethical dimensions of emerging human augmentation and AI systems. Duin and Pedersen argue that artificial intelligence (AI), biometrics, and other augmentation systems are not merely technical tools but rhetorical and ethical phenomena that influence, and are influenced by, political, cultural, and economic conditions in ways that reconfigure the roles, literacies, and responsibilities of communication professionals.

Users' experiences are critical to understanding people's reactions to smart home technology (SHT). Moreover, comparing users' experiences with differing SHT usefully situates those technologies in the context of their competitors. To that end, we compare the brand "titans" of SHT in a controlled, laboratory-based comparative usability study. Forty-nine participants engaged in 21 identical tasks in three "living room" labs—an Amazon room, Apple room, and Google room—each set up with a system of connected SHT devices. Analysis of qualitative and quantitative data shows that, generally, Apple was preferred most overall, followed by Google, then Amazon; however, voice interaction with Apple's Siri was rated lower than the other two. Hubs were generally dispreferred, compared to using voice commands or phone apps, though participants also criticized voice command functionality and app interfaces. The primary themes that emerged as most important for users' evaluations included their prior experience with devices' brand, user friendliness, the layout of device interfaces, and the quality of virtual assistants' functionality.

This article examines how digital contact tracing technologies for COVID-19 in Ghana, the US, China, and India function as persuasive technologies. Through comparative analysis, we investigate how each context emphasizes persuasive design strategies and how these align with national public health objectives. We propose an extended Common Interpretive Framework for Design Analysis (eCIFDA), which integrates Persuasive Systems Design with Interaction Design to map persuasive techniques to touchpoints within apps and a website. This study offers insights for technical communication scholars and practitioners seeking to strengthen the persuasive effectiveness of digital health interventions across diverse geopolitical contexts.

Introduction: This case study's purpose is to make visible the skills and knowledge necessary for the instant localization of screen readers. About the case: The case study examines the work of localization experts at a nonprofit organization in Hungary, who localize the proprietary Job Access with Speech (JAWS) screen reader software and support its target users. Situating the case: The study was informed by research in translation studies and localization-focused literature within the field of technical and professional communication. Research on accessible usability and software design was also consulted. Methods/approach: Participant observations and interviews with employees of the nonprofit organization and with the software's users were conducted. Data were transcribed, then coded using qualitative data-analysis methods. Codes that emerged from the data were grouped into themes to create a narrative interwoven with quotes about the activities of localization experts. Results/discussion: The findings from this study show that the instant localization process used by localization experts of this software requires a specific set of skills in addition to those used in project-based approaches to localization. Additional language and communication skills, as well as programming knowledge to develop additional program features and training materials, were found to be essential for addressing all users’ needs. Conclusion: Technical and professional communication practitioners can contribute to the localization of adaptive technologies through their strong usability, user experience, and communication skills.

About the case: While several established user-experience research (UXR) methods can reach far-away users (e.g., remote usability testing), the digital divide makes implementation difficult, especially for rural populations facing barriers to transportation and high-speed internet. Situating the case: Web surveys can eliminate these concerns by providing customization for specific use cases, gathering both qualitative and quantitative data, and combining multiple questionnaires and/or UXR methods within them. Our case study demonstrates an instance where our lab—Auburn University's Lab for Usability, Communication, Interaction, and Accessibility—used advocacy-based HCD and design thinking (DT) to develop a nonstandard UXR Qualtrics web survey to solve our client's wicked problem: designing a usability test for rural audiences unable to travel to our lab while also considering time constraints and technological literacy. Methods: Our survey design followed the Nielsen Norman Group's adaptation of DT, and our process was informed by academic research on: 1. Survey design, question formats, and response bias, 2. Existing user-experience (UX)/usability methods, and 3. Mixed-methods approaches to UXR. Discussion: Our work suggests this tool can potentially serve as the UX testing situation itself, implementing multiple in-person research methods (i.e., heatmapping, user interviews, card sorting) virtually. Conclusion: We conclude with six survey design suggestions and a discussion of how this nonstandard UXR tool can reach underrepresented or vulnerable populations, serving to empower and advocate for users. We suggest that using DT to ideate new UXR methods is a means for UXR practitioners conducting future studies to better address the wicked problems they will face.

Content personalization or tailoring content as per the needs of users has been a focus of technical communicators’ work since a very long time. Recently, algorithms have helped trace users’ characteristics such as devices they use, platforms they work on, local language spoken, etc. to personalize content through strategies like responsive content, automatic translation and so on. AI tools have extended algorithmic capabilities for personalization, but at the same time increased the randomness of personalized content. That is, algorithms produce different results for the same user at different times or different results for different users at the same time with the same prompt thus shifting the agency of both rhetors (or content creators) and the audience (or content users). While conventional technical communication pedagogy has focused on writing for users, and more recently on writing for algorithms which serve the users, today it is crucial to understand how technologies like AI impact knowledge consumption processes from a user experience perspective? And how can we teach content personalization and adaptive techniques in the increasingly digital spaces of audience interactions? These questions motivated our research. To follow the roles of algorithms and technical communicators closely, we analyzed three different case studies where algorithms are responsible for a high level of personalization beyond the decisions made by technical communicators. Our findings suggest that we must teach students to investigate concepts such as user personas in UX for understanding audiences, several methods of decision-making for content assets, and rhetorical ecology for a holistic view of content production to dissemination.

This paper highlights the reflective experiences of five graduate students who emerged as practitioner-scholars in the field of technical and professional communication (TPC) through their participation in the Spring 2025 graduate course, Writing Grants and Proposals, at Sam Houston State University. The semi-simulated, Better Sam Program assignment, grounded in a community-engaged and social justice framework, required students to develop unsolicited full proposals addressing local issues or opportunities within SHSU or the Huntsville community. This assignment challenged students to align their proposals with community needs while engaging in ethical, research-driven practices. Drawing on extensive community engagement, students developed proposals that were not only realistic and contextually grounded but also reflective of broader social justice concerns. The reflective process, guided by structured questions, encouraged students to critically analyze their proposal development experiences and consider the broader implications of their work for community advocacy and social responsibility. This paper presents these reflections, offering insights into how grant writing can be a transformative educational experience that fosters critical thinking, ethical engagement, and social impact.

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.

This article describes a gamified technical writing assignment inspired by the Hunt a Killer board games. Students solve a fictional mystery by analyzing AI-generated technical documents as an introduction to the most common deliverables and genres in the field and practice of Technical and Professional Communication. Grounded in research on gamification and AI, this activity fosters experiential learning by situating technical writing genres as both structured and dynamic tools. By combining genre analysis with collaborative problem-solving, the assignment offers a novel approach to teaching genre in technical writing, emphasizing flexibility and critical thinking.

The study highlights the crucial role of professional social media and LinkedIn instruction for students seeking employment. An analysis of 20 business and technical communication textbooks identifies significant gaps between textbook guidance and real-world expectations. Some textbooks in both fields fall short in offering actionable strategies for creating and maintaining a professional social media presence. While many textbooks emphasize the importance of social media or LinkedIn, most fail to provide concrete examples or best practices, such as keyword optimization for AI, effective networking strategies, and best practices for posting content. Grounded in digital literacy theory and professional identity formation, the study provides teaching recommendations, including the identification and adoption of supplemental materials to teach professional social media usage.

Agile methodologies often do not explicitly include the process of creating user documentation, consistent with the idea that documentation should be minimal to create efficient processes. While Agile provides several advantages for technical communicators, these processes also raise challenges that technical communicators creating user documentation need to address, including collaborating with development teams and evaluating the usability of user documentation. Building on existing research, this qualitative study aimed to understand both the advantages and challenges of Agile and illuminate how technical communicators and their colleagues address the challenges. We interviewed 14 practicing technical communicators and their colleagues over 3 months in the fall of 2022. Participants worked in six software development organizations across the United States, with one working in Europe. We analyzed results qualitatively to discern findings focused on three topics—general advantages and challenges of creating user documentation in Agile contexts, the dynamics of technical communicators interacting with Agile development teams, and the effects of Agile on assessing the usability of user documentation. We offer suggestions for practitioners and educators as they consider how Agile affects the creation of user documentation, leveraging the benefits of Agile, and addressing challenges in innovative ways as demonstrated by participants in this study. Future research will provide even richer perspectives.

The CIA's Operation PBSuccess represents a pivotal moment in Cold War securitization that illuminates technical communication's role in security contexts. We use Haas and Frost's apparent decolonial feminist (ADF) rhetoric of risk to trace how communicators mediated security logics across cultures and networks while exploiting technological asymmetries between the US and Guatemala. Building on theories of risk and (in)security framing, we demonstrate how the scriptwriters and hosts of Radio Liberación , as technical communicators, functioned as security actors complicit in the decades-long aftermath. We conclude by calling on technical communicators to approach risk communication through continued decolonial praxis.

This article demonstrates how biometric technologies operate through security logics, and how technical communicators can resist the process of securitization through what we refer to as “opt-out logics.” We question security logics through a case example of public-facing documentation from the Transportation Security Administration on the use of biometric technologies for domestic travel at airports across the United States. Our analysis focuses on three security logics: improving efficiency, mitigating risk, and paternalistic concern for passenger experience. To consider how these logics structure encounters, both authors provide personal narratives of their experience with biometric technologies in airports. Finally, drawing from tactical technical communication, we offer opt-out logics as modes of resistance in three categories: documentation, pedagogy, and design. We argue tactics of resistance are ways technical communicators can engage in resisting the expectation to opt in to systems.

This article builds a heuristic that raises the artificial intelligence (AI) literacy of Latine students. Nefarious people are exploiting marginalized Latine communities by using AI in creative partnerships, similar to those described in technical communication research, to build social profiles of Latines. These people are rhetorically using AI in passive-income and voice-over scams that target Latines who are insecure about their financial and citizenship situations. The heuristic offered here guides instructors on how to increase Latine students’ AI literacy by making these students aware of the rhetorical relationships between nefarious individuals and AI.