Undermining Risk and Technical Communication

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.

"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

• List of Illustrations Abbreviations 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 Enduring Legacy of the Law of the River Within the Colorado River Basin 6. Contradictory Risk Flows: The Uinta Basin Railway Project and the East Palestine Train Derailment Conclusion: Implications and Polyvocality ReferencesIndex