Expanding the Scope and Scale of Risk in TPC: Water Access and the Colorado River Basin

ABSTRACT

Building from a recent history of how technical and professional communication has addressed risk, we argue that the spatial and temporal frames through which the field has encountered risk must be confronted in working toward climate justice. We offer topoi that can be deployed to trace these interconnections and apply them to The Law of the River in the Colorado River Basin to illustrate how case studies can demonstrate the unequal distribution of climate risk.

KEYWORDS:

• Risk communication
• climate justice
• Colorado river
• topoi
• methodology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Development researchers use Majority World (and Minority World, conversely) to describe where the majority of the world’s population resides, yet possesses a fraction of its social, political, or economic power. The term serves as a corrective to Third World, Developing World, and Global South, which (1) represent outdated Cold War geopolitical tensions, (2) establish an unfair linear development standard that ignores that all nations are constantly evolving, and (3) are either descriptively inaccurate or imply geographic determinism, respectively.

2. Haas and Frost (2017) similarly argued that Ross’ (1994) study of “PCB contamination of the St. Lawrence River is a case of international risk communication, given that the Mohawk are a sovereign indigenous nation that has international relations across the U.S. and Canada” (p. 182).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ehren Helmut Pflugfelder

Ehren Helmut Pflugfelder is an Associate Professor in the School of Writing, Literature, and Film at Oregon State University. His research focuses on the intersections of scientific discourse, technical writing, risk, and rhetorical theory and he teaches courses in scientific and environmental writing, writing pedagogy, rhetoric theory, and technical communication. He is the author of Communicating Mobility and Technology: A Material Rhetoric for Persuasive Transportation (Routledge, 2017), Geoengineering, Persuasion & the Climate Crisis: A Geologic Rhetoric (The University of Alabama Press, 2023), and multiple research articles.

Timothy R. Amidon

Tim Amidon is an Associate Professor of digital rhetoric in the English Department and the Colorado School of Public Health at Colorado State University. His research, which explores the relationships between technologies, design, literacies, and risk, has appeared in Communication Design Quarterly, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, and a number of edited collections.

Donnie Johnson Sackey

Donnie Johnson Sackey is an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric & Writing in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas at Austin. His research centers on the dynamics of environmental public policy deliberation, environmental justice, and environmental cultural history. His research has appeared in Technical Communication Quarterly, Rhetoric Review, Review of Communication, and several edited collections.

Daniel P. Richards

Daniel P. Richards is an Associate Professor English at Old Dominion University, where he teaches courses in technical writing and rhetoric in the department’s undergraduate, master’s, and hybrid PhD programs. His research is situated largely in environmental risk communication, with most of his recent projects using empirical, UX-based research to investigate rhetorical assumptions about effective visual risk communication. He has edited two collections, On Teacher Neutrality: Politics Praxis, and Performativity (USU Press, 2020) and Posthuman Practice in Technical Communication (Routledge, 2018, co-edited with Kristen R. Moore), and has published in Pedagogy, Technical Communication Quarterly, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, and Contemporary Pragmatism, among others.