Citizenship and Advocacy in Technical Communication

Scholarly and Pedagogical Perspectives

Godwin Y. Agboka, Natalia Matveeva, Godwin Y. Agboka, Natalia Matveeva

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351360326
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Kommunikationswissenschaften

In Citizenship and Advocacy in Technical Communication, teachers, researchers, and practitioners will find a variety of theoretical frameworks, empirical studies, and teaching approaches to advocacy and citizenship. Specifically, the collection is organized around three main themes or sections: considerations for understanding and defining advocacy and citizenship locally and globally, engaging with the local and global community, and introducing advocacy in a classroom.

The collection covers an expansive breadth of issues and topics that speak to the complexities of undertaking advocacy work in TPC, including local grant writing activities, cosmopolitanism and global transnational rhetoric, digital citizenship and social media use, strategic and tactical communication, and diversity and social justice. The contributors themselves, representing fifteen academic institutions and occupying various academic ranks, offer nuanced definitions, frameworks, examples, and strategies for students, scholars, practitioners, and educators who want to or are already engaged in a variegated range of advocacy work. More so, they reinforce the inherent humanistic values of our field and discuss effective rhetorical and current technological tools at our disposal. Finally, they show us how, through pedagogical approaches and everyday mundane activities and practices, we (can) advocate either actively or passively.

PART ONE
Defining Core Competencies for Local and Global Advocacy and Citizenship

1
Female Practitioners' Advocacy and Activism

Using Technical Communication for Social Justice Goals

Emily January Petersen

Introduction

Women must navigate power structures in workplaces (Dragga, 1993; Bergman & Hallberg, 2002; Guy & Newman, 2004; Hamel, 2009; Favero & Heath, 2012; Budig, 2014), and they may react in various ways, including by claiming authority and agency in their interactions with those hierarchies (Schneider, 2007). As this chapter will show, a few women take authority a step further by becoming advocates. These women have experienced traumatic or disappointing events, and they use this understanding to advocate for others. They do not wish only to work within or around systems; they work to change them and use personal experiences to speak up and act on behalf of others through technical and professional communication (TPC).

My workplace experiences (and my inability to fully advocate for myself and others) inform this research on female technical communicators in workplaces. I worked in a department that was composed of some 300 men and six women. I was the only technical communicator and the only woman in a non-secretarial position. In upper-level staff meetings for the research and analysis division, I often heard inappropriate jokes from male colleagues. In fact, when interviewing for the position, the director of the division asked me when I planned to start a family and expressed anxiety over the possibility of me becoming pregnant. I am sure he did not extend these same questions to his male employees. I saw power dynamics and hierarchy in action. I learned that women were often objects for sexual jokes, and that my biology made me a liability to my company, no matter how good my work ethic, training, and abilities were. I did figure out ways to claim authority for myself through my supervisory role over an assistant writer, by being friendly with SMEs, and asking for leadership roles. However, I never advocated for anybody else. I did not use my experiences to change the system. It did not occur to me to use documentation to highlight inequalities or to persuade decision-makers.

The 39 women I interviewed had similar experiences. While almost all of them were content with their jobs and mostly felt valued, they had experienced feeling undervalued and shuffled aside for male employees. Very few of the women I talked with made hierarchical or organizational decisions. While some of them acted as managers for their teams, not many of them enjoyed this role, and those who did conceded that they did not have the power to fire, hire, or make decisions for their employees. I wondered: What power do female TPC practitioners have in the workplace? How do they find ways to overcome difficulties and, more importantly, to change the systems? This chapter will examine what two of the interviewees revealed about advocacy and activism through the use of TPC. It is important to understand how workers innovate and advocate in difficult situations through documentation, in order to prepare students and inform practitioners of what tools are available to them in tricky workplace situations. The information in this chapter suggests how such work in TPC can be accomplished. By conducting two case studies, I focused on answering two major research questions: How do women enact change on the workplace via genres, practices, tools, and texts? In what ways do practitioners engage in problem-solving?

The practitioners in this chapter’s case studies used both tactical (unofficial) and strategic (official) communication to achieve advocacy goals for marginalized groups within their contexts. They employed TPC expertise to advocate for others, and they engaged in forms of communication to counter the oppressive messages received from powerful hierarchies. The final section will elucidate the advocacy practices that emerge. These include (1) recognizing the relationship TPC has to advocacy; (2) appealing to powerful and political audiences and organizations; (3) using documentation to make advocacy official; and (4) engaging in coalition-building.

Advocacy and Activism in TPC

Advocacy is inherent to a technical communicator’s experiences because the field is concerned with users (Johnson, 1998), and essentially practitioners are constantly engaging in user advocacy. One of my interviewees stated, “I feel like I am the advocate for the users. . . . I speak up . . . because I’ve gotten to know these systems so well that I can speak up for the users.” She took responsibility for being accountable to her audience and future users of her documentation. While TPC practitioners do this routinely, as professionals who apprise users of technology and its intricacies, a few of the 39 women I interviewed saw themselves as formal advocates.

This sort of user advocacy in TPC has flourished into social justice, beyond civic engagement (Rude, 2008; Jones, et al., 2014). Social justice provides context for focusing on “the multiple voices of the marginalized, the discriminated, the colonized, and the oppressed” (Muñoz, 2014, p. 11). According to Walton and Jones (2013), “Centrally relevant to social justice is work that examines the importance of the role of technical communication for activist groups and other stakeholders involved in affecting change for disenfranchised and marginalized populations” (p. 31). So practitioners who keep the experiences of users in mind and advocate for better documentation as a result are working to equalize inequities. To take this a step further, the case studies in this chapter address specific ways to change conversations about inequities in the workplace and in nonprofit work. Many of the women I interviewed engaged in some form of advocacy or activism. They promoted 508 Compliance for users with disabilities, edited an app that provides the day’s history from a queer perspective, expressed interest in being a straight ally, advocated for same gender health benefits, and taught diversity training.

Women's Experiences as Knowledge

The advocacy of these women highlights the importance of valuing mundane and everyday experiences as a source of knowledge. Experience as knowledge is central to feminist standpoint theory, the idea “that knowledge is situated and perspectival and that there are multiple standpoints from which knowledge is produced” (Hekman, 2004, p. 226). In other words, knowledge is built and shared. Those who are not in official positions of power may see breaks in the power structure and act to make concerns known. Therefore, those with experiential knowledge must act because not all women (or men) are willing to advocate for themselves or others. In addition, those being oppressed and those engaging in advocacy must value their own knowledge. As Collins (2004) stated, “First, defining and valuing one’s consciousness of one’s own self-defined standpoint in the face of images that foster a self-definition as the objectified ‘other’ is an important way of resisting the dehumanization essential to systems of domination” (p. 108). Becoming aware of one’s ability to act in the face of oppression is a form of knowledge built from experience.

Tactical and Strategic Communication

Once aware, being able to act requires tactical and strategic communication, central to understanding organizations. Those in power employ strategic communication to contain tension and keep disruptive forces at bay while reifying the power structure. Strategic communication includes the culture of the organization, specific policies, and the ways in which employees are promoted or ignored. Hallahan, et al. (2007) defined strategic communication “as the purposeful use of communication by an organization to fulfill its mission” (p. 3). They suggest that this type of communication “implies that people will be engaged in deliberate communication practice on behalf of organizations” (p. 4).

However, I argue that strategic communication messages are also subtle, such as men making up most of the management structure, or suits and ties being part of the dress code. Support for this more nuanced understanding of strategic communication comes from Reicher & Levine (1994) who stated: “Those with power . . . take advantage of favourable [sic] power relations in order to give full expression to their social identities” (p. 512). They argued that strategic communication affects and is linked to social identity, and that “behaviour [sic] is an act of communication deployed to strategic ends. . . . [Groups] serve a crucial communicative role which is essential in achieving self-definitions” (p. 515). Those who maintain forms of strategic communication may not realize they are participating; however, such communication excludes particular workers and reinforces organizational strategies. Those enacting reified strategies have social privilege, or “entitlement, sanction, power, immunity, and advantage or right granted or conferred by the dominant group” (Black & Stone, 2005, p. 245). Such privilege blinds them to the oppression of others, and they may not realize that not all members of the group are granted the same status.

Privileged groups or individuals then participate in strategies, which are “systems, plans of action, narratives, and designs created by institutions to influence, guide, and at worst manipulate human society” (Kimball, 2006, p. 71). De Certeau (1984) defined strategy as “the calculation (or manipulations) of power relationships that becomes possible as soon as a subject with will and power . . . can be isolated. . . . As in management, every ‘strategic’ rationalization seeks . . . the place of its own power and will” (pp. 35–36). Similarly, Feenberg (2002) described operational autonomy or “the power to make strategic choices among alternative rationalizations without regard for externalities, customary practice, workers’ preferences, or the impact of decisions on their households” (pp. 75–76). Those who are interested in keeping organizational norms intact engage in this strategic choice-making and rationalization.

Those who disrupt norms respond through tactics. Tactical TPC is “the capability of the user to produce his or her own products from the detritus of the strategic, industrial world” (Kimball, 2006, p. 79). Furthermore, “users become producers of documents and artifacts that subtly resist authority” (p. 82). Kimball identified tactical communication as extra institutional in nature. While strategic communication occurs within organizations, tactical communication can be “influential in creating and shaping cultures,” and tactical communication occurs when a person might feel helpless in a dominant culture (p. 67). Feenberg (2002) described this as “reactive autonomy” or the “margin of maneuver,” which “may be reincorporated into strategies, sometimes in ways that restructure domination at a higher level, sometimes in ways that weaken its control” (pp. 84–85).

Tactics are kairotic, and workers who do not fit the dominant power structure of an organization might engage in such maneuvering. To do so, they must attune themselves to moments for tactical action in order to reterritorialize the system of the workplace. For technical and professional communicators, texts “produce a stable representation of shifting reality, [and] are among the tools used both to create common objects and to coordinate activity over time” (Winsor, 2007, p. 4). In other words, practitioners can use the tools available to them, such as documentation, to shift the narratives they encounter. Such tools will be detailed in the case studies presented in this chapter.

Case Study Methodology

In order to explore women’s experiences in the TPC workplace and answer how women enact change and engage in problem-solving, I used qualitative interviews and observations. I used these methods because they are suited to the idea that women’s experiences are best understood through their own voices, according to feminist theories. In TPC, feminist theory has been defined as including women’s experiences as legitimate subjects of study because female experience “reveals what is missing within other discourses and theories” (Lay, 2004, p. 431). Therefore, interviews and observations were my m...