Key Theoretical Frameworks

Teaching Technical Communication in the Twenty-First Century

Angela M. Haas, Michelle F. Eble, Angela M. Haas, Michelle F. Eble

• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781607327578
• eBook ISBN: 9781607327585
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Scrittura creativa

Drawing on social justice methodologies and cultural studies scholarship, Key Theoretical Frameworks for Teaching Technical Communication in the Twenty-First Century offers new curricular and pedagogical approaches to teaching technical communication. Including original essays by emerging and established scholars, the volume educates students, teachers, and practitioners on identifying and assessing issues of social justice and globalization.
 
The collection provides a valuable resource for teachers new to translating social justice theories to the classroom by presenting concrete examples related to technical communication. Each contribution adopts a particular theoretical approach, explains the theory, situates it within disciplinary scholarship, contextualizes the approach from the author's experience, and offers additional teaching applications.
 
The first volume of its kind, Key Theoretical Frameworks for Teaching Technical Communication in the Twenty-First Century links the theoretical with the pedagogical in order to articulate, use, and assess social justice frameworks for designing and teaching courses in technical communication.

Contributors: Godwin Y. Agboka, Matthew Cox, Marcos Del Hierro, Jessica Edwards, Erin A. Frost, Elise Verzosa Hurley, Natasha N. Jones, Cruz Medina, Marie E. Moeller, Kristen R. Moore, Donnie Johnson Sackey, Gerald Savage, J. Blake Scott, Barbi Smyser-Fauble, Kenneth Walker, Rebecca Walton
 

Part I

Embodied Knowledge and Risks

1

Apparent Feminism and Risk Communication

Hazard, Outrage, Environment, and Embodiment

Erin A. Frost

DOI: 10.7330/9781607327585.c001

Many emerging theories informing technical communication scholarship involve a shift in focus that recognizes the importance of how different people—operating out of different embodied experiences—interface in a diversity of ways with technical documents, ideas, and conversations (Scott, Longo, and Wills 2007; Williams and Pimentel 2014). For example, cultural theories, feminist theories, critical race theories, queer theories, and more have recently been brought to bear on technical communication’s traditional disciplinary spaces, and Haas (2012) has called for scholars to create “openings for further considering how to broach conversations about design and technology theory from and about scholars and users who are people of color—and from other underrepresented populations—in technical communication studies” (301). As the field recognizes the value of such theories, the importance of introducing and building upon them in pedagogical contexts becomes increasingly apparent. This chapter accounts for how apparent feminism—a methodological approach that seeks to make apparent the importance of feminist critiques and identities1 in modern politics—was used in a graduate-level course on risk communication.2 This course focused extensively on the ways risk attaches to particular bodies, and it asked students to use apparent feminism to consider how risk functions culturally and how technical and public understandings of risk communication messages affect lived realities.

This chapter situates risk communication in relationship to the field of technical communication; it explains what design and technology have to do with risk and why technical communicators should be paying attention. Further, it explores what critical approaches to risk communication pedagogy can teach instructors of technical communication. In service of this exploration, I offer a detailed account of my work with an apparent feminist pedagogical approach to risk communication and students’ responses to this framing. As Moore notes, “Not only is our research better when we diversify our pedagogies but so too can the sites and workplace practices we study become more equitable” (296). Finally, this chapter offers implications for our discipline; it extrapolates ways the field can intervene in constructions of risk that do not take into account the ethical effects on those who speak from the margins. Simultaneously, I offer my own theoretically informed reflections and ideas about the risks and benefits associated with teaching a course like the one I describe. Ultimately, apparent feminism—one of the many theories operating under the umbrella of cultural and critical theories—is a necessary and important approach to technical communication pedagogy that can help the discipline move toward socially just pedagogies and practices.

Risk and Cultural Studies in Technical Communication / Hazard and Outrage

Risk communication is an important subset of technical communication, but it also is a robust discipline in its own right. Areas of study that exist within or intersect with risk communication include crisis communication, environmental communication, organizational communication, disaster communication, health communication, risk assessment, and public relations, among others. Many scholars3 have done work demonstrating the importance of risk communication to the discipline of technical communication, often with an eye to “co-producing ethical, responsible, and responsive risk communication” (Haas and Frost 2017). In fact, Grabill and Simmons (1998) advocate for explicit citizen participation—which obviously values local cultures—in the construction of rhetorics of risk. They were, in part, taking up a call made by Plough and Krimsky (1990), who express the need for situating risk communication within a cultural framework. Plough and Krimsky assert that “if the technosphere begins to appreciate and respect the logic of local culture toward risk events and if local culture has access to a demystified science, points of intersection will be possible” (229–30).

In other words, this is an argument for moving risk and technical communication rhetorics toward considering culture and paying attention to embodiment. Embodiment takes into account a user’s body as well as the ways in which they have used that body (or have been coerced into using that body, or have endured that body being used) over her or his lifetime.4 A focus on embodiment means more than just paying attention to the normative ways that technical documents too often construct bodies and critiquing the common assumption of an objective or default body (usually meaning a white, straight, able, male body). It also means paying attention to the ways that these patterns, which have existed for generations, have influenced users’ experiences. As N. Katherine Hayles (1999) explains, “embodiment differs from the concept of the body in that the body is always normative relative to some sort of criteria” (196); embodiment, meanwhile, is a far more complex phenomenon derived from the physical presence of the body itself as well as the many experiences associated with being in a particular kind of body that must navigate a variety of cultural contexts.

Thus, the aforementioned rhetorical move—the trend toward the production of socially just risk communication as one of technical communication’s disciplinary agendas—is one that I seek to follow in this project, partially because risk communication is an area in need of critical attention. To explain, it may help to understand disciplinary definitions of risk. Risk is often articulated as (the perception of) the probability of a potential hazard. Risk communication consultant Peter Sandman (2014) offers a simple equation for thinking about risk: Risk = Hazard + Outrage. This standard definition, exemplified by Sandman’s equation, makes perception/outrage explicit. In other words, our perceptions of a hazard affect our understanding of the risk it poses. For example, I might consider swimming in the ocean a risky idea because of the possibility of shark attack. Even though statistics tell me the actual hazard is extremely low, the public outrage (think Jaws) associated with such events is a significant enough value to deeply influence my perception of the risk. The hazard associated with driving a car is relatively quite large, but the public outrage associated with car accidents is much lower, and I therefore take that risk on a regular basis. Thus, it is easy to see that public perception—which is influenced by many things, including embodied experiences—is a major factor in designing risk messages. However, public perception is too often invoked as a firm, easily discerned value; minority or marginalized publics who may have different perceptions of risk than the often-assumed “standard” public based on historical inequity are not often taken into account.

Thus, cultural studies and risk communication should be linked—especially when it comes to how we think about design and technology, concepts which are too often considered technical and objective rather than culturally situated (Haas 2012; Haas and Eble, this collection; Jones and Walton, this collection; Savage, this collection; Williams 1991). While this connection is rarely explicitly made in risk communication textbooks and other introductory materials, several risk communication journals—Risk Analysis; Risk, Health and Society; the Journal of Risk Research—have recently published work that could be considered complementary to cultural studies approaches (Hamilton 2014; Stengel 2014; Zhou et al. 2014). These examples notwithstanding, much more work remains to be done in expanding such approaches and making them explicit within the discipline of risk communication. Scott (2003) and Sauer (2003) offered models for culturally informed studies of risk with their attention to populations exposed to HIV/AIDS and populations whose socioeconomic class requires they live and work in risk, respectively. In addition, scholars who may not identify or appear to be risk communicators have already been doing this important work for some time. Much of it has focused on environmental hazard—note Sackey’s (this collection) contention that there is not a “line of demarcation between social justice and environmental justice” (138)—which is a common theme in my own research as well. Andrea Smith (2005), for example, has made a powerful argument about the relative risks experienced by native women; “American Indian women are twice as likely to be victimized by violent crime as women or men of any other ethnic group” (28), and “[p]erpetrators of sexual violence can usually commit crimes against Native women with impunity” (31) because “U.S. attorneys decline to prosecute about 75 percent of all cases involving any crime in Indian country” (32). Winona LaDuke (1999, 2005) has demonstrated how corporate and national apathy toward sacred places and traditions puts indigenous bodies in hazard, as when superfund sites are located near the water supplies of indigenous populations. Several authors (Woods 2010) have uncovered situations where class and ethnicity correlated inequities put particular bodies at greater risk of hazard to health and livelihood in post-Katrina New Orleans.

The scholars I cite above provide precisely the sort of exposure that technical communication scholars, practitioners, and students need in order to think about the interrelatedness of risk situations and the deeply unjust ways that bodies are exposed to risk. Critical and cultural approaches to risk communication pedagogy make the risks that critical theories address more apparent. Because of the connections between cultural theories and risk, culturally informed risk communication pedagogies are a particularly productive lens through which to think about technical communication pedagogies writ large.

Building on this foundation, apparent feminism provides a vital approach to risk and technical communication courses. Apparent feminism—like other cultural theories and cultural theory-based pedagogies—is a response to recognized risks. It is a response to risks faced by those who inhabit bodies that are not traditionally present in the academy. It is a response to risks faced by those who inhabit bodies too often devalued by hegemonic political forces. It is a response to risks not already recognized by those with significant cultural power. It is a response to risks too often reified in supposedly objective, neutral technical communication. While apparent feminism is just one of many important cultural theories with pedagogical applications, it is an approach with a wide variety of applicable benefits, as described below. Apparent feminism can help teach instructors of technical communication how to recognize and mediate a variety of risks on behalf of themselves, their students, and the future audiences those students design and write for.

Designing an Apparent Feminist Pedagogy of Risk + Teaching Research

Apparent feminism is a methodology I have developed in response to my fear that “technical communication students take far too few courses that use feminisms and other critical approaches to explicitly question rhetorics of objectivity, neutrality, efficiency, and truth” (Frost 2014, 111). Apparent feminism functions at the nexus of social, ethical, political, and practical technical communication domains (Hart-Davidson 2001; Johnson 1998; Miller 1989) in its goal of making apparent the urgent—and too often covered-up—need for feminist critique of contemporary politics, education, and technical communication. Apparent feminism emphasizes the importance of being explicit about feminist identity in response to socially unjust situations, invites participation from allies who do not identify as feminist but do complementary work, and seeks to make apparent the ways in which efficient work depends firmly upon the inclusion of diverse audiences. This approach, although not easy in and of itself, does transfer smoothly to the technical communication classroom. I have written elsewhere (Frost 2013a; Frost 2014) about the exigence and importance of apparent feminist pedagogies, and this chapter builds my project of demonstrating through pedagogical action what apparent feminist pedagogies look like and what benefits they offer to their users (both instructors and students) and the field of technical communication.

My focus in this chapter is on how I used an apparent feminist pedagogy in a graduate, distance education course on risk communication by modeling my own research, confronting the fallacy of pedagogical objectivity, encouraging students to engage risks to their own online identities, and asking students to think about disciplinary trends regarding the embodied distribution of risk. I have employed various iterations of apparent feminist pedagogies in a variety of undergraduate and face-to-face courses. However, this was only the second time I’d employed apparent feminist pedagogy in a graduate, distance education course; I’d also used it in a methods course in the fall semester. This is important because several students in English 7765: Risk Communication were also in that fall methods class and thus were familiar with my apparent feminist approach. This is also important information because my experience in the fall methods class helped me to fine-tune the ways I designed the course. For example, in the fall I began the class with a video introduction. Based on the response to that—which was largely that my embodiment (in particular, my age) was surprising/distracting—I did not utilize an introductory video in Risk Communication.

Rather, I designed English 7765: Risk Communication to focus on embodiment, and the applied meta-lesson I asked students to engage with throughout the semester was their own online embodiment. I asked students to undertake a project that operationalized the cyberfeminist finding that the Inter...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword by Gerald Savage
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Social Justice Turn
• Part I: Embodied Knowledge and Risks
• Part II: Space, (Em)Place, and Dis(Place)Ment
• Part III: Interfacing Public and Community Rhetorics with Technical Communication Discourses
• Part IV: Accommodating Different Discoursesof Diversity
• About the Authors
• Index