Key Faculty Publications

Dan Card contributed a chapter, "Boundary Waters: Deliberative Experience Design for Environmental Decision Making," to the forthcoming edited collection Technical Communication for Environmental Action. 

Climate change is one of the most significant challenges facing the global community in the twenty-first century. With its position at the border of people, technology, science, and communication, technical communication has a significant role to play in helping to solve these complex environmental problems. This collection of essays engages scholars and practitioners in a conversation about how the field has contributed to pragmatic and democratic action to address climate change. Compared to most prior work—which offers theoretical perspectives of environmental communication—this collection explores the actual practice of international technical communicators who participate in government projects, corporate processes, nonprofit programs, and international agency work, demonstrating how technical communication theories such as participatory design, social justice, and ethics can help shape pragmatic environmental action.

This book from Ann Hill Duin and Isabel Pedersen enables readers to interrogate the technical, rhetorical, theoretical, and socio-ethical challenges and opportunities involved in the development and adoption of augmentation technologies and artificial intelligence.

The core of our human experience and identity is forever affected by the rise of augmentation technologies that enhance human capability or productivity. These technologies can add cognitive, physical, sensory, and emotional enhancements to the body or environment. This book demonstrates the benefits, risks, and relevance of emerging augmentation technologies such as brain–computer interaction devices for cognitive enhancement; robots marketed to improve human social interaction; wearables that extend human senses, augment creative abilities, or overcome physical limitations; implantables that amplify intelligence or memory; and devices or algorithms for emotional augmentation. It allows scholars and professionals to understand the impact of these technologies, improve digital and AI literacy, and practice new methods for their design and adoption.

This book will be vital reading for students, scholars, and professionals in fields including technical communication, UX design, computer science, human factors, information technology, sociology of technology, and ethics.

The rise in the use of non-human agents and Artificial Intelligence (AI) is disrupting all fields and professions. One of the greatest challenges facing professional and technical communication scholars and instructors is a reticence to prepare for writing futures in advance of these major technological transformations. 

Writing Futures, from Ann Hill Duin and Isabel Pedersen, provides a future-driven framework for investigating and planning for the social, digital literacy, and civic implications of collaborative, algorithmic, and autonomous writing futures. Use of this book by scholars and practitioners across a broad range of disciplines and organizations provides opportunities to understand and write alongside non-human agents, examine the impact of algorithms and AI on writing, accommodate the unique relationships with autonomous agents, and investigate and plan for writing futures.

Unique to this book is its integration with Fabric of Digital Life, a database and structured content repository for conducting social and cultural analysis of emerging technologies and the social practices that surround them. It includes concrete examples of the social, digital literacy, and civic implications of specific technologies so that readers can examine these technologies within key contexts that are constantly evolving. 

In Stigma Stories: Rhetoric, Lived Experience, and Chronic Illness, Molly Margaret Kessler focuses on ostomies and gastrointestinal conditions to show how stigma is nearly as central to living with chronic conditions as the conditions themselves. Drawing on a multi-year study that includes participant observations, interviews, and rhetorical engagement with public health campaigns, blogs, social media posts, and news articles, Stigma Stories advocates for a rhetorical praxiographic approach that is attuned to the rhetorical processes, experiences, and practices in which stigma is enacted or countered.

Engaging interdisciplinary conversations from the rhetoric of health and medicine, disability studies, narrative medicine, and sociology, Kessler takes an innovative look at how stigma functions on individual, interpersonal, and societal levels. In doing so, Kessler reveals how stories and lived experiences have much to teach us not only about how stigma functions but also about how it can be dismantled.

Writing in the Clouds by John Logie is an intensive examination of the profound consequences of contemporary writing technologies for the act—and art—of composition. In the 1980s and 1990s, the increasing adoption of computers as digital composing tools prompted scholars to re-examine the roles technology might play in written composition. This book elaborates those consequences at a time when internetworked writing has supplanted digital composition. Our centuries-long relationship with paper as the default space for certain types of written composition has been thrown into question. The advent of ebooks and their sharply spiking popularity is one indication of the ongoing technological and cultural shift. Perhaps more important is the relative affordability of tablet computers and their increasingly widespread acceptance and use in roles that formerly required paper-based writing. For years, the notion of the paperless office has been an ironic joke. Paper consumption soared after the adoption of desktop computers. Now portable and tablet computing appear to be contributing to a dramatic decline in US per capita paper consumption. Today’s writers are increasingly aware of the likelihood that their compositions may never be printed. When they are certain that their works are being developed for digital delivery, they cannily adapt their writing to exploit the affordances of internetworked digital spaces. Writing in the Clouds offers history, analysis, and a set of keywords to help readers better understand these changes in their particularity and help them prepare for what’s next as writers embrace the expansive opportunities of cloud-based writing spaces. [More information on the book Writing in the Clouds.]