Disrupting the Past to Disrupt the Future: An Antenarrative of Technical Communication
These panels represent a necessary turn in the field of technical communication: moving from mere ethics, which often exist in an individual’s character or behavior, to a social justice stance, which tends to be more collective and action oriented.
Rude’s “social action” category of TPC scholarship, though considerations of inclusion and diversity in technical communication research and pedagogy remain sparse
We argue that the field needs a more focused study of the ways inclusivity has emerged in the field and the strategies/approaches that can usefully extend the pursuit of inclusivity
antenarrative (They link the static dominant narrative of the past with the dynamic “lived story” of the present to enable reflective (past oriented) and prospective (future oriented) sense making) of the field’s history: a disruptive “before”story that seeks to destabilize and unravel aspects of the tightly woven dominant narrative about who we are as a field, what we do, where our work occurs, and what we value.
framework addresses inclusion by interrogating how social and ideological identity markers (like race, gender, sexuality, and ableness) are co-constructed and shaped by what we call the 3Ps: positionality, privilege, and power
These 3Ps function as macro level concepts that can affect social capital and agency. In regard to TPC, an awareness of how the 3Ps are articulated and inscribed in our work is a necessary step toward increasing the inclusivity of our research and practice.
Interrogating the dominant narrative:
effectiveness as a sole criterion for “good” technical writing
privileging pragmatic topics such as usability and information design with an eye to workplace problem solving
antenarrative we present in this article rests upon widely accepted movements in the field, namely, humanism and the sociocultural turn, in which focus shifted from problem solving and efficiency to human impact
These threads include scholarly work that typically functions at the margins: scholarship in feminism, sexuality, and gender studies; user advocacy; community-based research; intercultural and international studies; disability studies; and race and ethnicity studies
Framework for more inclusive TPC research:
This heuristic scaffolds researchers in (1) thinking more critically about how certain groups are marginalized and disempowered and in (2) recognizing specific ways that our research can either reinscribe marginalization and disempowerment or promote agency and advocacy.
In crafting our antenarrative, we suggest that social justice scholarship might provoke other now-silent (or silenced) scholars to develop research agendas that reach toward the goal of inclusion. We also call for other ways forward, other goals, and other approaches and methodologies for social action