Steven Fraiberg

Reassembling Technical Communication: A Framework for Studying Multilingual and Multimodal Practices in Global Contexts

Drawing on a case study of an Israeli start-up company, this article maps out a theoretical and methodological framework for linking local multilingual and multimodal literacy practices to wider institutional, cultural, and global contexts. Central to this framework is attention to the linking of tools, texts, and people distributed across space-time. This process foregrounds the complex mediation of activity and the dynamic pathways shaping the ways English is being reassembled in local-global ecologies.

Start-Up Nation: Studying Transnational Entrepreneurial Practices in Israel’s Start-Up Ecosystem

This study focuses on start-up entrepreneurs on the move—in coordination with an array of other actors—as they weave and are woven into transnational networks. Central to this study is a shift from activity to mobility systems. Building on technical communication scholarship, the frame integrates actor networks and activity theory knotworks. Disrupting workplace and national container models (methodological nationalism), the analysis is grounded in a study of Israeli start-up entrepreneurs. Dubbed the Start-Up Nation, Israel contains more start-ups per capita than any other country in the world, with its high-tech industry made up of a dense ecosystem of conferences, accelerators, meetups, social media, and coworking spaces. Tracing actants’ trajectories across this social field, the author argues for a conceptualization of entrepreneurs as knotworkers who mobilize genres, modes, languages, and spaces.

Designing a Writing Across the Curriculum program at the University of Michigan's College of Engineering

At the University of Michigans College of Engineering there has been a call to better prepare students with the skills that they will need in business and industry. As a result, the Program in Technical Communication is reevaluating its Writing Across the Curriculum program. The complex nature of the program, which involves faculty members across the college and a wide range of topics, often leaves faculty members with too little guidance and students who often complain that the courses are a patchwork of unrelated topics. In order to meet the challenges of running this complex program, the Program in Technical Communication is running a pilot project in the Department of Bioengineering. In this project, we are working together with engineering faculty in order to establish a clear set of outcomes and objectives. Our goal is to design curriculum that seamlessly integrates the communication and technical learning activities. We reflect on issues involved with designing curriculum as well as implementing our Writing Across the Curriculum reform.