Jeffrey T. Grabill

Toward a critical rhetoric of risk communication: Producing citizens and the role of technical communicators

In this article, we build on arguments in risk communication that the predominant linear risk communication models are problematic for their failure to consider audience and additional contextual issues. The “failure”; of these risk communication models has led, some scholars argue, to a number of ethical and communicative problems. We seek to extend the critique, arguing that “risk”; is socially constructed. The claim for the social construction of risk has significant implications for both risk communication and the roles of technical communicators in risk situations. We frame these implications as a “critical rhetoric”; of risk communication that (1) dissolves the separation of risk assessment from risk communication to locate epistemology within communicative processes; (2) foregrounds power in risk communication as a way to frame ethical audience involvement; (3) argues for the technical communicator as one possessing the research and writing skills necessary for the complex processes of constructing...

Institutional Critique: A Rhetorical Methodology for Change

We offer institutional critique as an activist methodology for changing institutions. Since institutions are rhetorical entities, rhetoric can be deployed to change them. In its effort to counter oppressive institutional structures, the field of rhetoric and composition has focused its attention chiefly on the composition classroom, on the department of English, and on disciplinary forms of critique. Our focus shifts the scene of action and argument to professional writing and to public discourse, using spatial methods adapted from postmodern geography and critical theory.

Coming to Content Management: Inventing Infrastructure for Organizational Knowledge Work

Two project profiles depict content management as inquiry-driven practice. The first profile reflects on a project for a national professional organization that began with a deceptively simple request to improve the organizations website, but ended with recommendations that ran to the very core mission of the organization. The second profile focuses on an organizations current authoring practices and tools in order to prepare for a significant change: allowing users to develop and organize content.

Action Research and Wicked Environmental Problems: Exploring Appropriate Roles for Researchers in Professional Communication

The authors report on a 3-year action-research project designed to facilitate public involvement in the planned dredging of a canal and subsequent disposal of the dredged sediments. Their study reveals ways that community members struggle to define the problem and work together as they gather, share, and understand data relevant to that problem. The authors argue that the primary goal of action research related to environmental risk should be to identify and support the strategies used by community members rather than to educate the public. The authors maintain that this approach must be supported by a thorough investigation of basic rhetorical issues (audience, genre, stases, invention), and they illustrate how they used this approach in their study.

Shaping Local HIV/AIDS Services Policy through Activist Research: The Problem of Client Involvement.

This article argues that professional writing researchers can help shape public policy by understanding policy making as a function of institutionalized rhetorical processes and by using an activist research stance to help generate the knowledge necessary to intervene. My goal is to argue for what activist technical writing research might look like, lay out an understanding of institutions that is helpful for influencing public policy, and illustrate the promises and the problems of both positions by using the case of a study focused on local HIV/AIDS policy making. According to this way of thinking, professional writing researchers can impact policy by helping change the processes by which policy gets made.

Messy Rhetoric: Identity Performance as Rhetorical Agency in Online Public Forums

Our essay draws from a study of interaction in a large and active online public forum. Studying rhetorical activity in open forums presents a number of methodological and conceptual challenges because the interactions are persistent and nonlinear in terms of when and how participants engage, and engagement often happens via textual fragments. We take up two related issues in this essay: one is the methodological challenge of how to study engagement in open digital places. We take up that issue by way of the example study featured here. The second issue is more conceptual and concerns how identity is leveraged as a form of rhetorical agency in these conversations. We argue that in the context of open forums like Science Buzz these identity performances are crucial as rhetorical agencies, creating space as they function to move discussion.

Community Computing and Citizen Productivity.

Abstract This article is about the development of a community network in an Atlanta, Georgia, neighborhood. The project was a long-term effort using community-based design with the goal of helping a community use information technologies to enhance more effectively the life of the community. The argument is about designing information technology tools in community contexts, developing new models of research for community-based work, and about the critical importance of engaging in community-based work that can be sustained over time. The argument also focuses on the necessity of designing community networks that both recognize the productive power and expertise of community residents as well as allow for productive practices to be developed and used in the future.

Content management in the workplace: Community, context, and a new way to organize writing

The authors report on a multiyear study designed to reveal how introducing a content management system (CMS) in an administrative office at a large organization affects the office’s writing and work practices. Their study found that users implemented the CMS in new and creative ways that the designers did not anticipate and that the choices users made in using the CMS were often driven not by technology but by the social implications the CMS held for their office. By contrasting how writers negotiated specific genres of writing before and after the CMS was introduced, the authors argue for increased attention to providing flexible technologies that enable writers to innovate new tools in response to the social needs of their writing environments. This approach must be driven by research on the implications of technology in workplace communities.

Utopic visions, the technopoor, and public access: Writing technologies in a community literacy program

This article is about access to writing technologies in nonschool settings and sees access as perhaps the most fundamental and complex issue related to writing with computers. The discussion is framed in terms of writing with computers outside the composition classroom, using an Adult Basic Education program as an example. This article considers issues related to community literacy programs, workplaces, work, and class in an explicit attempt to expand the scope of work outside the composition classroom. This article argues that public access to computer writing technologies is a significant public policy and educational issue, and that computers and writing specialists have the expertise and experiences to contribute usefully to policy making, research, and teaching in nonschool contexts, thereby, hopefully, expanding public access to writing technologies.

Grassroots: Supporting the Knowledge Work of Everyday Life

This article introduces a simple mapping tool called Grassroots, a software product from a longitudinal study examining the use of information communication technologies and knowledge work in communities. Grassroots is an asset-based mapping tool made possible by the Web 2.0 movement, a movement which allows for the creation of more adaptable interfaces by making data and underlying database structures more openly available via syndication and open source software. This article forwards three arguments. First is an argument about the nature of the knowledge work of everyday life, or an argument about the complex technological and rhetorical tasks necessary to solve commonplace problems through writing. Second is an argument about specific technologies and genres of community-based knowledge work, about why making maps is such an essential genre, and about why making asset maps is potentially transformative. Third is an argument about the making of Grassroots itself; a statement about how we should best express, test, and verify our theories about writing and knowledge work.