Changes the conversation about risk by exposing the field's historical complicity with extractive industries and building new methodologies for future risk communication research.
Technical and professional communication has a problem with how the concept of risk has been considered alongside extractive technologies. Throughout its history, the practice, teaching, and research of technical and professional communication has been embedded within, complicit with, and indebted to these industries. These industries have also created massive global harm to people and ecosystems, both through accidents as well as the slow violence of pollution and climate change. In response, this book seeks to "undermine" how technical and professional communication works with risk by reconsidering implications that traverse a greater span of time and geography. It revises the field's risk methodology and encourages future researchers to navigate the scope and scale of their projects. Along with new theoretical framing, the text presents three detailed case studies illustrating how careful consideration of scope and scale can impact how technical and professional communication engages extraction and risk, showcasing to new and experienced technical communication researchers alike how risk communication is about to enter a new era.
Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
1. Undermining Institutions of Risk
2. Many People Have Died So That Technical Communication Can Live: An Alternate History of Risk and Technical and Professional Communication
3. Moving Beyond the Industrial Present in Risk Communication: Rethinking Models and Methodology
4. Riskscapes: The Bonita Peak Mining District and the Displacement of Native Americans in the San Juan Mountains
5. Timescapes Amid a Water Crisis: The Ongoing Megadrought Within the Colorado River
6. Contradictory Risk Flows: The Uinta Basin Railway Project and the East Palestine Train Derailment
Conclusion: Implications and Polyvocality
References
Index
About the Author :
Timothy R. Amidon is Associate Professor and Chair of Professional and Public Writing at the University of Rhode Island. He is editor in chief of Communication Design Quarterly. Ehren Helmut Pflugfelder is Professor of Scientific, Technical and Professional Communication at Oregon State University. He is the author of Communicating Mobility and Technology: A Material Rhetoric for Persuasive Transportation and Geoengineering, Persuasion, and the Climate Crisis: A Geologic Rhetoric. Daniel P. Richards is Professor of English at Old Dominion University. He is the editor of On Teacher Neutrality: Politics, Praxis, and Performativity and, with Kristen P. Moore, of Posthuman Praxis in Technical Communication. Donnie Johnson Sackey is Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Trespassing Natures: Species Migration and the Right to Space.
Review :
"Undermining Risk and Technical Communication extends how TPC scholars can conceptualize risk, moving from discrete moments of disaster to long-term unfolding of hazards for capitalist gains while disproportionately affecting marginalized communities. This book formalizes this conception of risk and provides several concepts that help us read risk and crisis more expansively." — Ryan Weber, University of Alabama in Huntsville
"This book will change how the field of TPC discusses the origins of the field, its complicated history, its current practices and research projects, and future interventions we commit to fulfilling. It provides a blueprint for doing this work within risk communication, but it also goes beyond that in providing a map for us to think about how we may want to understand our fields' commitment to and actions toward justice-oriented and ethical futures." — Michelle F. Eble, East Carolina University
