Matters of Form: Questions of Race, Identity, Design, and the U.S. Census

ABSTRACT

This case examines how functionalist approaches manifest culturally based on users’ contexts. The authors conduct a critical visual semiotic analysis of the race and Hispanic origin questions on the 2010 U.S. Census form, demonstrating how incongruities in design potentially harm people. This demonstrates a need for adding critical analyses to design and research and it refocuses the Society for Technical Communication’s value of promoting the public good on to design and documentation in order to fight injustice.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical theory
• design of communication
• ethics
• intercultural communication
• rhetorical theory
• textual analysis
• visual rhetoric/visualization techniques

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Deborah Balzhiser

Deborah Balzhiser is an Associate Professor at Texas State University - San Marcos whose work examining relationships between discursive, digital, and material formations has appeared in JBTC, Kairos, Technoculture, and CCCC.

Charise Pimentel

Charise Pimentel is an Associate Professor in the Department of Curriculum & Instruction at Texas State University - San Marcos. Her teaching and research focus on race and education, multicultural education, bilingual education, and critical media literacy.

Amanda Scott

Amanda E. Scott is a Senior Lecturer at Texas State University - San Marcos where she teaches technical writing and composition. Her research seeks to explore relationships between documentation design, representations of racial identity, and social inequities.