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Tech comm may have a reputation for being “objective” and “neutral,” but that reputation has made it too easy for the field to distance itself from the real injustices it has perpetuated. In their important book Technical Communication After the Social Justice Turn, Walton, Moore, and Jones show how social justice is integral to technical communication and explain foundational concepts such as privilege, intersectionality, and coalitional action. For instructors and practitioners wondering “What can I do?” this book is an excellent place to start.
Plus, stick around for Fun with Fungi with Benton, our resident fun guy.
Sources and further reading
- Crenshaw, K. (2022). On Intersectionality: Essential Writings. New Press.
- Graham, C. (2021, September 15). The 7 and 7 Is a Refreshing Throwback to the ’70s. The Spruce Eats. https://www.thespruceeats.com/seven-and-seven-cocktail-recipe-761496
- hooks, bell. (2014). Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (3rd ed.). Routledge.
- Rhett & Link. (2013, June 3). Taylor Swift Caption Fail. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MuDgfX9C2w
- Walton, R., Moore, K., & Jones, N. (2019). Technical Communication After the Social Justice Turn: Building Coalitions for Action. Routledge.
- Young, I. M. (2022). Justice and the Politics of Difference, revised edition. Princeton University Press.
Transcript
| A | Welcome to TC talk. I’m Abi. |
| B | and I’m Benton and Fern is trying to get in. |
| A | And scratching at the door is our cat Fern. There’s always that question. Do we shut the door only for her to scratch at it and us to let her in anyway, or do we just let her hang out with us from the beginning and risk her climbing the walls of our blanket fort? What’s TC talk all about Benton? |
| B | Tc talk is a podcast about technical communication. |
| A | Not to be confused with communical education. |
| B | Communical education, |
| A | which is what our six-year-old thought my area of study is. |
| B | well, let’s get down to it. What are we drinking tonight? |
| A | taste it and see if you can guess what it is. |
| B | I think that it is sprite with whiskey. |
| A | That, yeah. Also known as a 7/7, referring to a combination of 7-Up and Seagram’s 7 whiskey. But we aren’t using those precise elements. Frankly, I like Sprite better than 7-Up anyway. Are you able to tell a difference? |
| B | I don’t know. |
| A | It could just be some deep seated brand loyalty thing. Like everybody thinks they like Coke more than Pepsi. But then when they are in a taste test, they can’t really tell the difference. I could drink Sprite all day, every day. The last couple of episodes we did, if you’ll recall, were downers. Give us the recap. |
| B | So we had one episode that was about how technology furthers racism. The most recent episode was about medical history in fact, and how it was awfully racist. And certainly gives rationality to hesitancy to trust the medical establishment in minority groups in the United States. |
| A | Yes. You’re going to be stuck here all night. |
| B | Me or the cat? |
| A | because you have a cat on your lap. And that was just scratching the surface. I did want to do an episode that’s a little bit more actionable. So we know about these problems, but let’s address what to do about them in our role as technical communication researchers, instructors, or practitioners. Therefore, our theme for the day is social justice and advocacy in tech comm. |
| B | Oh, I’ve got a question for you. A two-part question. What is social justice? Part two. What is advocacy? |
| A | Let me turn to page two of my notes. This comes from Walton, Moore and Jones. They say “social justice research in tech comm investigates how communication broadly defined can amplify the agency of oppressed people. Those who are materially, socially, politically, and/or economically under-resourced. Key to this definition is a collaborative, respectful approach that moves past description and exploration of social justice issues, to taking action to redress inequities.” |
| B | Oh, okay. |
| A | I’m glad you asked me that because it shouldn’t have taken until the bottom of page 2 for me to address that since it is the theme of |
| B | our chat here. Did you describe advocacy? |
| A | No, because I didn’t get that far. |
| B | Oh. |
| A | We’re going to have this conversation in parts. |
| B | Okay. |
| A | I don’t know if I’ll need to break it up into multiple episodes or if we can just knock this out over a couple of evenings. Yeah, so that’s, that’s a great place to start. And a lot of the, the key terms within that definition should become clearer as we proceed. |
| B | Back to page one. |
| A | Do you think social justice has anything to do with tech comm? That was obviously a leading question. |
| B | Okay. |
| A | So you know the answer’s going to be yes, but |
| B | The answer’s going to be yes, but I think that you cannot strive for social justice without technical communication. |
| A | Ooh. |
| B | Let me explain. Justice is this nebulous concept. |
| A | There’s like five frameworks for justice that we can talk about later if you want. |
| B | No. I’m just saying that it’s nebulous. And as you said, there are five frameworks for it. So it’s not something that is universally agreed upon, |
| A | True. |
| B | Okay. So you say that there is injustice. How is there injustice? Let me tell you the statistics. |
| A | So technical communicators have a role to play in demonstrating that there is injustice? |
| B | Yes. |
| A | Can technical communication work to redress that injustice? |
| B | Yes. |
| A | Good answer. No matter what you do, no matter what profession you’re in, you can strive for social justice. But what can technical communicators specifically do to contribute? |
| B | When they are crafting their communication, which is of course, technical in nature, to do so in a way that keeps in mind audience. If you have a picture in your mind as you’re writing of. Okay. My boss gave this to me. He is a white dude. I am crafting this artifact for him. Don’t forget that your audience may not be your boss. |
| A | So in other words, a big piece of that is broadening, broadening our sense of audience and not just relying on stereotypes. That’s huge. I have three books I want to talk about. Needless to say, this won’t be comprehensive. I can’t do these books justice, in a single episode. |
| B | Or would you try to do it on social media? |
| A | Because do it justice and social… we have a rule around here that when one of us makes a bad pun, we need to acknowledge it one way or another. |
| B | Yes. |
| A | It does not need to be a positive acknowledgement. Groans count and eye rolls. |
| B | They are their own sort of reward. It has to be a visible enough eye roll though. |
| A | Right. I’ve learned that if I don’t acknowledge your jokes at all, then you will mansplain them to me. |
| B | I will dig into why it’s funny and you should acknowledge it. |
| A | So when talking about these books, I want to help people get a sense of what the books offer, why they might be useful. Kind of the big ideas behind the connections between social justice and tech comm. And then give some examples of what people in my field out in the world are doing to make social justice happen in their tech comm work. |
| B | Sounds good. |
| A | The first book is Technical Communication After the Social Justice Turn from 2019 by Walton, Moore, and Jones. And their names might be familiar because I mentioned their article in our Moby Dick episode. That would be the Tech Comm’s Existential Questions one. This book is really an expansion and refinement of those ideas. And I think every tech comm scholar should be familiar with it. Not just those scholars who focus on social justice research. No matter what you specialize in, you can’t get away from it at this point and you shouldn’t be able to. I mean, we know too much about injustice, inequity, discrimination, to not consider those things in anything that we do. |
| B | Can’t get away from it. |
| A | By the time I finished this book, the only thing I want to more of was examples, those concrete examples. What does it look like to act out these principles in teaching and research? So the next book I’m going to talk about is Citizenship and Advocacy In Technical Communication. An edited collection by Agboka and Matveeva. And this one was published in 2018. So actually before this tech comm after the social justice turn book. So I think of it as paving the way for a more overt emphasis on social justice in the field. The other book I’ll talk about is Equipping Technical Communicators for Social Justice Work, published in 2021 also an edited collection, this time by Walton and Agboka, which is basically a direct response to that need for accounts of actual practice. All right, back to the social justice turn. First of all, what the hell is a turn? |
| B | Is it like in board games? |
| A | No. |
| B | No. Okay. |
| A | And I say this because it’s one of those things everyone thinks is obvious to everyone else. But when it’s your first time encountering it, you’re just like What the fuck is a turn. Which in fact was my reaction my very first modern rhetorical theory class in my doctoral program. Professor was talking about such and such a turn in rhetorical theory. And I was just dumbfounded. To the authors’ credit they define it. It represents |
| B | Good for them. Before we move on too much, I want to take my turn. I had exactly the same reaction when I heard about the Arctic tern. What the fuck is a tern. It’s a sea bird, by the way, and it’s spelled T E R N not T U R N. Sorry. |
| A | Let’s turn this around. A wave of scholarship, but also a change in perspective that whether or not everybody in the field subscribes to this way of thinking, you’re going to be affected somehow. I think of it almost like turning a big ship. It’s not going to be instantaneous because there’s so much inertia. Is that the right physics term? |
| B | Yes. Yes. Inertia is exactly it. It’s the tendency of a thing to resist change. |
| A | Then that is an even better analogy than I realized. Like I was talking about before, the dominant narrative of tech comm has been pragmatism and problem-solving. And they don’t dispute that. But what they do say is that injustice is a technical communication problem. Quote, “these efforts to problem-solve makes sense to us, TPC, that is technical and professional communication as a discipline has prided itself on practicality, on applicability, on being both an industry profession and an academic field of study. We are scholars and practitioners who prefer to get things done, to get to work, to engage with problems and solve them. Engaging these classic concerns of the field, the social justice turn extends core considerations of TPC even as it shifts the field’s identity.” You can almost see them anticipating their objectors, I think. You can kind of picture someone saying “what does social justice have to do a tech comm? We just write user manuals” and they point out why this is easy to do, to kind of see that disconnect. They write “because the field often appears to be removed, sometimes twice removed, from the atrocities of domination, the field can maintain and has maintained its distance from the violence, oppression, and injustices it perpetuates.” |
| B | It perpetuates. |
| A | Yes. Like we talked about in the What Can Go Wrong episode. The default is discrimination. So if you’re designing and writing neutrally, you are by default supporting the status quo, which is discriminatory. And in that episode we talked about how designers of certain technologies kind of distance themselves from the consequences of that technology. So if people who design technology can create that distance from it, oh, it’s not me, it’s the algorithm. Then it’s all the easier as say, a technical communicator who writes documentation for said technology to feel even more removed from its consequences. |
| B | Hence, the twice removed. |
| A | Right. Why do we need justice? |
| B | Oppression sucks. That’s why we need justice. |
| A | And that’s another of those terms that we should probably stop and define. And they define it drawing on the work of Iris Marion Young. Her understanding of it is important because it makes it impossible for dominant groups to claim, say, reverse racism, right? There are a few specific things that are components of oppression that white people do not experience, even if they experienced an isolated incident that felt unfair to them. For instance, marginalization, cultural imperialism, violence. And the violence thing is relevant to technical communication because you will recall we had a whole episode on Weaponized Rhetoric and how |
| B | Violence need not be physical. |
| A | Precisely. And language can contribute to violence or justify violence. And the example they give is Ferguson, so the police shooting of Michael Brown, the officer who shot him, the officer described him as demonic. So, dehumanizing language. |
| B | Demonic. Wow. So that’s not only dehumanizing, but also throwing around religious terms. |
| A | Drawing from bell hooks, they also bring up a strategy of injustice, which is essentially victim blaming, blaming oppressed people for their own oppression. Think back to when I was talking about the storytelling we do as a society around poverty. And who deserves |
| B | oh yeah, |
| A | support versus who deserves to be homeless because of the choices they’ve made. |
| B | You’ve made your bed. So now you can sleep in it, not in a bed though. Metaphorically, you can sleep in your bed. |
| A | Another thing that’s important to understanding oppression is that it is intersectional. Have you heard that term before used in social justice contexts? |
| B | Never. |
| A | So when two cars arrive at a cross street. |
| B | It’s an intersection. |
| A | No, it comes from Kimberle Crenshaw. |
| B | I think that intersectionality is kind of when you have overlapping oppressions. |
| A | Yeah, you nailed it. And here’s why that’s important. You can’t look at one type of oppression in a vacuum. Because that’s what happened with the feminist movement, which focused on gender but not race. |
| B | And so it helped white women out. |
| A | precisely. Or even the Black Power Movement, which focused on race and not gender. |
| B | And so that helped Black men out. |
| A | In both cases, leaving Black women, leaving them behind. So we know about oppression. What is justice? I mentioned before, we can talk about multiple frameworks of justice. You’re right, there’s not one thing. And that’s part of doing justice right is not universalizing it. |
| B | Doing justice, justice. |
| A | Indeed. Instead of going through the frameworks, which again, read the book yourself, I’ll just give an example of why we need more than one view of justice. Okay. Procedural justice, that can be understood as fairness of process, essentially. So the same process should apply equally to everyone. Sounds nice, right? What could go wrong? |
| B | My guess is that what could go wrong is that not everyone will have the same obstacles to overcome in order to complete said process. |
| A | That is true. They actually say it can be used to cover up discrimination because they can say this was a fair process, but overlook things like, like you said, failing to acknowledge that people face different obstacles due to oppression. Or another one might be insisting that we use the exact same process when we pull over drivers for speeding. Great. But who is getting pulled over more in the first place? |
| B | People of Color. |
| A | All right, back to their definition, which I read at the top. But I want to touch on a few of those key terms. We know a little bit more about what it means for someone to be oppressed. They also emphasize action. We’re moving past just describing and exploring issues of injustice to actually doing something about it. And that action needs to be collective. Their sub-title is Creating Coalitions for Action. What they mean by coalition is not that you have to agree with everyone in your coalition, but you do need a shared goal. And the more diverse the group, the better. But again, |
| B | Unity, not uniformity. |
| A | Hey, I like it. Yeah, that’s exactly it because we don’t want to collapse differences. |
| B | The American melting pot is bullshit, it’s a rebranding of oppression and assimilation. |
| A | The other thing I appreciate is that they acknowledge that you might feel overwhelmed or intimidated by engaging in social justice work. You can worry that you don’t know enough or you don’t know the right way to do it. And I’m speaking for myself here, right? I am an audience of this book. I’m reading the book. I want to do better. I don’t know how. And what they say is that it’s through doing it, that you learn it. So don’t wait until you feel comfortable. And it’s not a matter of if you mess up. But when you mess up and how do you respond to it? |
| B | So it sounds like what I read in the foraging book by Samuel Thayer, anything worth doing is worth doing poorly the first time. |
| A | I disagree, there are wrong ways to do social justice. For instance, coming in and being like, Hey, I’m a white person and I’m going to use my privilege to talk all over you and, which is a thing that happens. Reading books like this, it’s a starting point. So if you go into this work not quite understanding what it means to have privilege, then you’re more likely to do damage for instance. |
| B | I’ll say then instead of the mantra, anything worth doing is worth doing poorly the first time, perhaps, you don’t need to know it all |
| A | Know everything to do anything. |
| B | That’s what I was looking for. You got it. You don’t need to know everything to do anything. Along with that is the concept be inquisitive. Mentally place yourself in the role of learner so that you ask questions of other people. |
| A | Be reflective. Another thing that helps with this feeling of being overwhelmed by all the injustice in the world and what can I do? is to realize that the little things do matter. They write, “one of the reasons we believe tech comm specifically should be committed to social justice is that injustices often live in the mundane choices that technical communicators make. How drop-down menus look, whether a form is translated in another language, if captioning is included in a tutorial video, we believe that working coalitionally the individual choices we make, the small choices about design and representation, the ways we treat our students and colleagues, and the ways we run our programs can work to redress inequities in small ways. These mundane choices become part of a collective that moves toward inclusion and justice as a whole.” I don’t know about you, but I find that very encouraging because you’re thinking of it not as having to turn an entire ship around, but turning it by degrees, perhaps. |
| B | Yeah. I mean, you can’t turn the whole ship in a different direction because you don’t control the whole ship. There are none who can. |
| A | Yep. Maybe that’s where the analogy falls apart because it’s not like everybody has their own little individual steering wheels. |
| B | They do, they’re just like the things that you give a kid in the backseat of the car, they don’t do anything. |
| A | Well now that’s sad, that defeats the purpose of my whole point here. Then they go into this framework they call the three Ps. And it’s essentially how to analyze positionality, privilege, and power. We’ve talked about positionality before on this show. We all have our own identities, which are not static, but we’re all situated in a certain way. It’s a lens for viewing yourself and others. Where do you come from? Where do you fit in? What kinds of history, worldview, et cetera, are you bringing to a situation. Closely related with privilege. Which, what do you understand that to be? |
| B | When you are privileged, you don’t know how good you have it, because things that are frictional, things that are hard for other people are not for you. And you, as a consequence, don’t think about things like balancing needs in a very tight budget. |
| A | Yeah. That’s exactly right. You have privilege when aspects of your identity line up with what’s considered normal or default. White, male, able-bodied. You’re right. Those with privilege typically don’t notice that they have it. But for those who don’t have the privilege there on the outside looking in. So they see others privilege because they see their lack of it at the margins. Like a fishbowl. |
| B | When you’re in the fishbowl, you don’t know what water is. |
| A | Yeah. And this matters to tech comm because when designing user experience or communications, it’s very easy to exclude people that don’t fit a kind of standard, it’s very easy to assume that the people you’re writing for are just little copies of you. Here’s a super obvious example and relatively minor, designing stuff for left-handed people. Back when people used computer mice. No, people still use mice. |
| B | Yeah. |
| A | Scissors. Desks. |
| B | Yes. That’s true. That’s true. Like in the auditorium seating? Almost all of the desks are on the right side. Some of them out of a few 100, there’ll be like five left-handed desks. |
| A | So if you walk in and you have right hand privilege, you don’t know what it’s like to have to walk in, maybe get there early, scope things out to find a spot that’s going to be comfortable for you. Obviously, the stakes are much higher when dealing with things like race, gender, et cetera. Power, then, they say that when it comes to theorizing power, listen to those who are powerless. They are going to conceive of power differently than those who already have it. And it’s not enough to point it out, there’s that action piece. And they give the example actually of instructions. Sort of your quintessential tech comm genre. Can you think of an example of instructions that exclude certain audiences? |
| B | Places where the instruction writer assumes that, you know, that the reader will have all of the things that they have at hand. I love, okay, so I love this example of, we’ll say, an Ina Garten recipe. Use fresh organic hand-cut this, store-bought is fine. |
| A | If you don’t have hand foraged wild mushrooms, store-bought is fine. |
| B | Right. Although to be fair. She at least is aware that people don’t all have time to go and forge their own mushrooms. |
| A | Exactly. |
| B | And says that store-bought is fine. But it still seems like a, you know, a look down your nose and say, well store-bought is acceptable. |
| A | And it’s great that they have left-handed desks in that auditorium, right? But wouldn’t it be better if every desk could fit a person of any handedness? |
| B | On the other hand, you could have just described it as non-chiral. Sure. Oh, okay. So chirality is handedness. It’s from chemistry where certain molecules can have exactly the same structure but different handedness has different effects. |
| A | And that’s where the idea of access can be empowering because you’re not making exceptions after the fact to include more people. You’re planning from the beginning. |
| B | Proactively including |
| A | Precisely, |
| B | rather than reactively including, |
| A | Right. So that would include things like adding alt text to written instructions and adding captions to video instructions, what? |
| B | I was just thinking of caption fails. Rhett and Link. |
| A | Oh. Yes. |
| B | They’re good fun. |
| A | They’re super old by now, but really entertaining. And surprisingly teach a very good lesson about why not to trust the YouTube automatic caption generator. I’ll link it in the show notes. Okay, so use the three P’s to assess a situation. Then you use the four Rs to respond to a situation. Recognize injustices, reveal those injustices to others. Reject injustices and replace them with intersectional coalitional practices. I’m not going to go in depth on these because again, read the book. But what I really appreciated was that they gave two case studies that showed concrete situations where somebody might think through these three Ps and for Rs, and what that might lead them to do. |
| B | I do have to say, it sounds a little bit like a PR stunt, |
| A | Ps and Rs. |
| B | There you go. |
| A | And essentially it just widens the types of solutions that you can think of. Because we’re very, yeah, we’re used to seeing things in binary ways. Either I can do this or I have to do that. And, bringing other people into the process too. I think that’s enough for now. So let’s just take a break and hear a word from our sponsor. Sprite. Just kidding. Let’s continue the tradition started as of last episode. |
| B | Way back then. Fun with fungi. |
| A | Do we need a jingle? |
| B | Insert jingle here? A fun fact is that in the grocery store, you might see three fairly common types of mushrooms. White mushrooms, baby bella or cremini mushrooms, and Portobello. Note that all three of these have at least half a dozen names for that specific type of mushroom. And also they are in fact, all the same species. Agaricus Bi I don’t remember how it ends. Bisporus. |
| A | Different stages of development? |
| B | Yes. So |
| A | Face hugger versus xenomorph. |
| B | Ah yes. Although definitely less scary in all cases |
| A | and more edible. |
| B | and substantially more edible because their blood is metal-corroding acid. |
| A | Good call. |
| B | Back to mushrooms. I’ve got a question for you, Abi, out of the entire world production of mushrooms, which country do you think produces the most? |
| A | I wouldn’t even know where to begin. So I’m going to name a big country, China. |
| B | It is China. |
| A | Whoo. |
| B | China in fact produces 75% of all of the mushrooms produced in the entire world. |
| A | Among those three you mentioned, do they taste the same and they’re just different shapes, essentially? |
| B | I don’t think the flavor is substantially different. Portobello is a little bit more developed flavor wise. It has a little more complexity and nuance to it in my opinion. |
| A | What can you do with a Portobello mushroom? |
| B | A Portobello mushroom, because it is mature and big. They get to be six inches across, |
| A | Like a cookie. |
| B | Like a cookie. A big old shroom cookie. |
| A | That sounds like a different thing, which you may or may not want to eat. |
| B | So Portobello mushrooms can be used, I’ve seen it typically done where the like the stem gets to be a little bit tough on portobellos. So often it’ll be just the cap that you eat. And it is often used as a replacement for meat. In the forms of, you know, replacing a burger patty, putting cheese on it. |
| A | You can just grill it. |
| B | Oil it up some, throw it on the grill, |
| A | Turn it into a little pizza. |
| B | You could turn it into a pizza. |
| A | and you could add baby bellas |
| B | Like a mushroom squared. |
| A | And then if you serve it at a restaurant, you can use the different terminology and make it sound fancier than it is. |
| B | Yes. A Portobello Cremini pizza, to which I would say Criminy, that’s the same mushroom. |
| A | Joke acknowledged. |