Introduction to Special Issue: Black Technical and Professional Communication

ABSTRACT

Black Technical and Professional Communication is defined as ”practices that are centered around Black community, culture, and rhetorical practices that are inherent in the Black lived experience. Black TPC is reflective of the cultural, economic, social, and political experiences of Black people across the Diaspora” (Black TPC Taskforce). This special issue emphasizes the importance of valuing Black TPC as fundamental to developing a comprehensive understanding of the technical and professional communication.

KEYWORDS:

• History of technical communication
• historical technical communication
• Racial studies
• cultural studies
• Social justice
• ethics
• Black Communities
• Black Cultural Studies

“I’m going to talk about experiences that are specific to me as an African American” (Dr. Samantha Blackmon, 2004).

In October 2020, the Black Technical and Professional Taskforce, constituted by Dr. Vershawn A. Young and led by Dr. Temptaous Mckoy, published a statement and resource list that aimed to amplify the work of Black technical communicators and Black technical and professional communication (BTPC) scholars. The task force included the following scholars: Drs. Natasha N. Jones, Cecilia Shelton, Donnie Johnson Sackey, Kimberly Harper, Ja’La Wourman, and graduate student Constance Haywood. The statement and list “offer(ed) a thematically organized and contextualized list of suggested readings, drawn from both within and outside the discipline and/or the academy” (para. 3). In addition, the statement did important definitional work, clearly defining BTPC as technical and professional communication (TPC): “practices that are centered around Black community, culture, and rhetorical practices that are inherent in the Black lived experience. Black TPC is reflective of the cultural, economic, social, and political experiences of Black people across the Diaspora” (Black Technical and Professional Communication Taskforce, para. 2).

Moreover, in defining BTPC, we assert that BTPC is not a niche or add-on subfield of the discipline of TPC, even though it has traditionally been treated as such. BTPC is an important and integral part of TPC and foundational to understanding how TPC is taken up, applied, theorized, and shaped in culturally sustaining and contextual ways. This special issue moves BTPC from the margins of the field of TPC to the center. hooks (1984) notes that “to be in the margin is to be part of the whole but outside the main body” (p. xvi). BTPC is valid, valuable, and essential to meaning-making and knowledge creation in the field, and further, a “necessary, vital part of [that] whole” of TPC (hooks, 1984, p. xvi). In this special issue, we amplify the work and scholarship of Black technical and professional communicators and invite scholars in the field to further showcase just what it means to be Black and a technical communicator. Drawing on Mckoy’s (2019) theory of amplification rhetorics that (1) centers the ways of learning, (2) privileges lived experiences, and (3) values Black language practices, we model the deep, sustained, and meaningful engagement with BTPC scholarship and practice that reaches beyond cursory and uncritical citation practices (Jones, 2021). We also emphasize a justice-oriented, transformative praxis that facilitates the centering of Black scholarship and practices within the field of TPC (Shelton, 2019). This special issue is unapologetic in its pro-Black ethic and approach for understanding research and pedagogy, arguing that “there is no anti-racist future in our world, much less our organizations and programs without the liberation of Black women, trans and non-binary folx, femmes, and other marginalized Black identities” (Jones, Gonzales, & Haas, 2021, p. 30). To that end, our work in this special issue calls on Black intellectual traditions as a way to foreground the histories, legacies, and futures of BTPC.

The scholarship in this special issue relies on the labor of two important groups of scholars: the earliest researchers grappling with race within the disciplinary bounds of TPC and Black scholars in adjacent fields, like rhetoric and composition, each group insisting on a more inclusive and just orientation to their disciplines. Both groups of scholars have paved the way for the interventions we make with this special collection. Jones (2020) points to the ways that rhetoric and composition scholars have been grappling with issues of race for decades and acknowledges that TPC, as a field, has been slower to interrogate the implications of race on TPC research, pedagogy, and practice. Noting that scholars in rhetoric, writing studies, and composition have made both subtle and overt connections to TPC, we draw on the example of Black scholars in other subdisciplines, who have carved out space for research that insists on the recognition of the full humanity of Black people and prioritizes our goals and lived experiences in the research process. These scholars focus on work in literacy and language studies (like Geneva Smitherman, Elaine Richardson, April Baker-Bell, Beverly Moss, Denise Troutman), rhetoric and rhetorical practices (like Gwendolyn Pough, Tamika Carey, Ersula Ore, Adam Banks, Keith Gilyard, Carmen Kynard, Jacqueline Jones Royster), and composition and writing programs (like Staci Perryman-Clark, Collin Craig, Vershawn Ashanti Young, David Green) and others. We honor these scholars and assert that their scholarship is integral and important for helping us to set a standard for the work we feature here.

As this issue specifically focuses on Black TPC, we find it of the utmost importance to trace the historical work by Black scholars within TPC that emphasizes how race has been addressed in the field. More importantly, tracing this history and highlighting work that refuses to generalize (using the term “race” as a stand-in for Blackness) does important rhetorical (and technical) work of making visible and legitimizing the work of Black scholars in the field. In general, while some work in TPC that addressed race did so by way of examining diversity and representation (Jones, Savage, & Yu, 2014; Savage & Mattson, 2011; Savage & Matveeva, 2011), in 2004 Samantha Blackmon gave the keynote address at the annual Council for Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication (CPTSC) conference. Blackmon, discussing recruitment and retention of marginalized folks in technical and scientific communication programs (an issue that persists to this date in many technical communication programs) began her keynote by refocusing the conversation about minority recruitment and centering her experience as a Black scholar in our field. Blackmon asserted, “I’m going to talk about experiences that are specific to me as an African American” (Blackmon, 2004), and this echoes the goal of this special issue. Blackmon’s assertion and keynote address is honest and much needed and takes on the issue of race (and Black experiences in the field) head-on, something not often done in the early 2000s in TPC. More importantly, in many ways, it was as if Blackmon, during the keynote address, called Black TPC into existence. In her speech, she noted all of the areas of focus that she finds fruitful for examining race in rhetorically informed approaches, stating:

There are so many possible areas of study that we are just beginning to explore. There are historical concerns (for example educational history, technological history, and rhetorical history; there are pedagogical concerns (how do cultural differences and history affect classroom dynamics and learning styles?); there are critical theory concerns (how and whether or not mainstream pedagogical theory can be applied to students of color); and now there are even cultural studies and new media concerns (how do minority issues affect broader society as a whole and how can these things be used to critique and be beneficial to said society. (Blackmon, 2004)

Contemporarily, we recognize all of these areas of interest being investigated and engaged across scholarship in TPC. This special issue honors the work that Blackmon began with her unapologetic keynote, and we begin our historical tracing of BTPC with Blackmon, at that podium, in 2004.

A few years after Blackmon’s address, we see an important and field-shaping shift marked by Williams’s scholarship that centers Black experiences in TPC, one of the first scholars to emphasize the Black experience in TPC. In fact, one of Williams’s (2006) early contributions to the field of TPC draws on the work of one of the 20th century’s most well-known Black intellectuals and public scholars: W. E. B. DuBois. In “Tracing W.E.B DuBois’ ‘Color Line’ in Government Regulations,” Williams (2006) studies ethos and government mistrust in the African American community through legal and regulatory writing, urging scholars in TPC to understand the historical implications of racism and the embeddedness of racial laws, regulations, and restrictions in our legal systems (both historically and contemporarily). Williams (2006) asserts that TPC has often “overlooked” (p. 144) issues of race, specifically regarding African Americans, and she adeptly draws in work from other fields of study (sociology, social studies, and history) to ground her arguments about public policy, trust, and African Americans. In her carefully constructed argument about regulatory writing and its impact on Black folks in America, Williams breaks new ground in TPC by moving Black experiences from the margin to the center of TPC scholarship. Later, Williams (2010) extended her examination of ethos, regulatory writing, and Black business owners in Texas in her book From Black Codes to Recodification: Removing the Veil from Regulatory Writing.

The year before Williams’s article on the color line and regulatory writing, Banks (2005) published his award-winning book Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground. As with Williams’s work, Banks’s focus is on Black lives and lived experiences as related to TPC. Even the title of Banks’s (2005) book, a clear homage to Stevie Wonder’s musical masterpiece “Higher Ground,” honors Black culture and community. At every turn, Banks makes it known that the Black experience and soul is fundamental to understanding why technology has and will continue to be a centerpiece of Black liberation. “Soul,” Banks argues, “is the continual, committed search for higher ground, whatever the limits of public or scholarly discourse may be” (2005, p. 134). Banks traces soul through Black cultural images, songs, icons, practices, intellectuals, and communities. More pointedly, Banks asks, “Why is technology access the central issue in African Americans’ continual struggle for justice and equality? Why should it be the major ethical issue in rhetoric and composition as well as technical communication?” (2005, p. 10, emphasis added). Over the course of the book, as Banks examines transformational technology across Black culture, his work sets up the foundations for impacting our field in several ways: via the lens of activism (seeding the current social justice and inclusion turn in TPC), via African American discursive practices (making connections to Black scholars in rhetorical studies), through engagement with critical race theory (informing current conversations about the role and necessity of critical race in our fields of study), via understandings of Black pre-digital practices (influencing the subdiscipline of material and digital rhetorics), and in Black technology development and Black digital spaces (laying the groundwork for our understanding of more current Black digital practices). Banks affirms that BTPC is fundamental to shaping our discipline. And for those who weren’t convinced in 2006, in 2012, Haas reminded the field of TPC of Banks’s call to focus on race and technology, arguing that “race and place matter to technical communication research, scholarship, curriculum design, and pedagogy” (p. 279). In her pedagogically focused article “Race, Rhetoric and Technology: A Case Study of Decolonial Technical Communication Theory, Methodology, and Pedagogy,” Haas (2012) laments the dearth of scholarship that centers race and notes that she found it necessary to draw on scholarship from outside of TPC. Still, she states hopefully that “the discipline of technical communication is on the verge of reciprocating by contributing to the interdisciplinary work transpiring at the intersections of race, rhetoric, and technology” (2012, p. 282).

Despite the progress that scholars are making, however, TPC is still slow to center race and ethnicity in continuous and consistent ways. But Haas’s article is promising because it was also published in the first special issue of one of our field’s major journals to specifically focus on race and ethnicity. This historic special issue of the Journal of Business and Technical Communication (JBTC), published in the middle of the Obama presidency and edited by Williams and Pimentel (2012), calls out the myth of colorblind research, practice, and pedagogy and the hesitancy of our field to discuss race (this, 8 years after Blackmon’s keynote address). In fact, Williams and Pimentel (2012) argue in the introduction that since 1994, the field “has seen an encouraging number of academic articles that discuss gender and international technical communication; still, few discuss technical communication as it relates to race and ethnicity within the United States” (p. 272). Then, in 2014 Williams and Pimentel published an edited collection, Communicating Race, Ethnicity, and Identity in Technical Communication, drawing together scholars from across the field to examine the multitude of ways that race and ethnicity shapes TPC pedagogy, practice, and scholarship.

With the social justice turn of TPC, the work of another prominent Black scholar leads the field in its push for progress and inclusion. Agboka’s groundbreaking 2014 article “Decolonial Methodologies: Social Justice Perspectives in Intercultural Technical Communication Research” is largely marked as the beginning of the social justice turn. With Agboka’s article being the first to begin to purposefully define social justice for the field, TPC scholars have turned and returned time and again to Agboka’s work that directly calls out as “emerging postmodern challenges” considerations of equity, justice, and liberation: “issues of ideology, power, social justice, ‘glocal’ tensions etc. – in unenfranchised or disenfranchised intercultural contexts?” (2014, p. 297–298). Agboka critiques the field as ill-prepared for the challenges of justice, equity, and intercultural contexts and further calls on the need for “a coherent body of new methodologies with their corresponding methods that are cognizant of local logics, rhetorics, histories, philosophies, and politics” (2014, p. 298). As Agboka makes clear that “academic research is always cultural, in many respects, and is always laden with political, power, and social justice concerns,” (p. 299) he directly addresses issues of colonialism, power, intercultural research and scholarship, and the obligation of TPC to seek out and implement methodologies that are attuned to justice, equity, and decoloniality. Further, Agboka’s work points to the larger African diasporic spaces, places, and communities as sites for TPC scholars to contribute and acknowledge the “role research can play in seeking social justice for international audiences” (p. 320). After Agboka’s article, we note an uptick in TPC work dedicated to social justice, equity, and inclusion in academic contexts, industry contexts, and larger societal social-political contexts.

Finally, after the TPC social justice turn, and with more and more scholars looking to engage and address concerns of power, colonization, race, and inclusion, TPC begins to address race more directly and attend to Black experiences, contributions, and scholarship. It is during this scholarly transitional period and during defining sociopolitical moments and movements like the Black Lives Matter movement, the racial unrest of 2020 due to continued police murders and brutality, the white supremacist and socioracial regressive Trump presidency, and the clear racial health and economic disparities of the COVID-19 pandemic that the aforementioned statement and resource list by the BTPC Taskforce is developed, bringing us to this special issue. This historical tracing makes clear that we stand on the shoulders of the Black scholars, activists, and change-makers in our field who paved a way before us.

The legacy of these scholars, activists, and change-makers–Williams, Banks, Agboka, Haas, and Blackmon–is apparent in this special issue. Banks’s consideration of technology and race has given way to recent examinations of the impact of technology on Black users. For instance, in this issue, scholars Yusuf and Namboodri Schioppa extend our field’s interest in not only exploring new sites of TPC but also considering how such scholarship can be in service of social justice. In “A Technical Hair Piece: Metis, Social Justice, and Technical communication in Black Hair Care on YouTube,” Yusuf and Namboodri Schioppa illustrate how, from slavery to today’s workplaces, discussions of Black hair have often been framed by discourses of oppression or resistance. Yusuf and Namboodri Schioppa demonstrate why discussions of Black hair care (specifically) and Black experiences (broadly) matter to TPC research, teaching, and outreach. As a corrective, Yusuf and Namboodri Schioppa address the social justice communication work performed by the community of Black hair care YouTubers, who intervene in normative discussions of hair care and offer Black hair care instructions that attend to issues of marginality in ways that normative technical discussions based on Eurocentric aesthetics fail to address.

As with Banks’s work, Black folks’ experiences with technology as users of technology are not the only ways in which Black folks contribute to technological development. Banks argues for the importance of Black perspectives in the rhetoric of design and the need for Black spaces, places, and engagement regarding technological advancement and technological access. Further, Banks connects the rhetoric of design, history, and Black rhetorical practices, highlighting the role of narrative. Banks states:

African American design traditions, however, whether in print, physical, or virtual spaces, have been so ignored as to seem nonexistent. The stories of Black quilters and architects as designers can help to demonstrate the crucial roles design has always played and can continue to play in collective action and day to day living–roles that open up participation to many, if not all, rather than consigning virtual futures to so-called experts and consumer-driven notions of technology. (2005, p. 122)

We recognize traces of Banks’s work extended and taken up in how Byrd illustrates that Black software developers and coders are shifting their existing literacy skills and practices to enter tech industries. Black software developers and coders are simultaneously making their narratives apparent for other Black professionals interested in making career changes, encouraging participation and engagement by Black tech professionals in order to have a technological and affective impact on their work and experiences in industry. In “Black Professional Communicators Testifying to Black Technical Joy,” Byrd also highlights the importance of emotional literacies of Black professionals in technical fields. Framing his argument that Black professionals can guide newcomers into these technical job opportunities by articulating their own affective experiences with technical careers, Byrd coins the term Black Technical Joy as a way to describe the rhetorical practices that Black professional communicators use in professional development resources to support these strategic career pivots for fellow Black professionals.

In her 2004 keynote, Blackmon speaks to the importance of community for Black folks and other multiply marginalized groups. And, though Blackmon is specifically discussing academic spaces and places, the concept of community and its importance to Black lived experiences is undeniable. In “Handling Family Business: Technical Communication Literacies in Black Family Reunions,” Allen situates TPC inquiry squarely within this Black American community experience. Allen’s research is anchored in the unique historical and contemporary significance of Black family reunions, positioning her to consider the layered and complex motivations for reunion events themselves and the many related goals and tasks that must be executed to produce them. Allen’s contribution challenges readers to reframe traditional notions of TPC as being tied most often to business, industry, and workplace settings. By calling scholars’ attention to the family and community context, Allen’s work directs our attention to contexts where Black technical and professional communicators exist but often have been overlooked.

As evident in Allen’s work, historical implications of Black ways of engagement, organizing, and activism are important for understanding contemporary issues in BTPC. Williams’s work around archives and historicizing BTPC is also taken up by Edwards and Walwema in this journal special issue. In “Black Women Imagining and Realizing Liberated Futures,” Edwards and Walwema provide a historical account of labor strikes among Black laundresses in late 17th century Atlanta, Georgia. Situating agency, user knowledge, and mobilization among these women as integral to conversations around BTPC, Edwards and Walwema extend conversations of BTPC as a means to further understand the roles that organized resistance and lived experience play in how Black people must navigate and (ultimately) problem-solve when living under a host of exploitative racial, gender, class, and socioeconomic conditions. Focusing primarily on the efforts of the Washerwomen’s Association of Atlanta, Edwards and Walwema locate practices central to BTPC through protest, design, and activism in ways that prove insightful and relevant in today’s world. Highlighting the washerwomen’s ability to foreground their experiences as a means of truth, legitimacy, and exigency in their strike efforts, Edwards and Walwema revisit questions of expertise and destabilize more conventional definitions around who is/can be a technical communicator. These authors position Black technical experts as those who are tasked with the duty of negotiating a range of oppressive systems in order to simply live and survive; Black technical experts are central to Black lived experience. Edwards and Walwema’s work provide a lens to examine how Black activism and Black technical practice align in historical contexts.

We also note echoes of Blackmon’s keynote address in BTPC scholarship that considers how issues impacting marginalized groups also affect broader society. Blackmon forecasted that solutions for broader social change will originate with Black or other marginalized folks. Pouncil and Sanders’s contribution to this special issue posits how knowledge-making is born out in discussion of coalitional strategies rooted in Black feminism. Their argument honors the intellectual contributions of Black feminist activists who have made space for Afrocentric possibilities in TPC. In “The Work Before: A Model for Coalitional Alliance Toward Black Futures in Technical Communication,” Pouncil and Sanders build upon the work of folks like The Combahee River Collective (1977) and adrienne maree brown, offering a framework that affords readers an opportunity to consider how we are all implicated in designing a pro-Black future. Key to their framework is inward critical reflection, which is a practice of “deep inward reflection [that helps us consider] how our pasts shape our coalition engagement” or as Sanders surmises, what allows us to “listen differently, shift perspective, and understand [that our] specific roles in coalition must be understood as specifically contextual” and outward critical reflection, which accounts for how understanding differences in shared identities is integral for coalition work. Pouncil and Sanders offer readers a tangible heuristic for using reflexivity in the service of creating sustainable and meaningful diverse coalitions in pursuit of justice across a variety of bodies – corporeal and institutional.

Even beyond the articles included in this special issue, we trace the legacy of the groundbreaking work of scholars that we mention above who put race into conversation with legal discourse, technology use, pedagogy, and social justice. We’re excited about the ways that Black scholars not included in this special issue are modeling a pro-Black approach to TPC. For instance, Alexander’s work (Alexander & Walton, 2022) that applies a Black Feminist lens in order to enhance diversity, equity, and inclusion recruitment and retention initiatives in TPC program administration. In addition, Scott’s scholarship examines the multimodal construction of institutional narratives by historically Black colleges and universities, including the contributions of various stakeholders, many of whom she understands as technical communicators (Scott, 2022). Scott is also the co-founder, along with Maraj, of DBLAC, a digital network of Black scholars, purposefully committed to Black graduate students and whose programming illustrates clear connections between Black digital practices, composition, literacy, and TPC. Additionally, Roundtree’s research lies at the intersections of usability, science, health, medical communication, and TPC. Finally, Dorpenyo’s scholarship investigates voting technologies; intercultural communication; and issues of power, localization, and globalization in non-Western contexts. We find exceptional value in these scholars’ (and other Black scholars’) contributions. And it is because we value and seek to center Black voices and experiences in TPC that we find it essential to situate this burgeoning body of scholarship not only within the social justice turn in TPC, but also in a long legacy of Black intellectualism and knowledge-making that carved out space for this intervention in our field.

The Black intellectual tradition in which we stand extends beyond the academic lineage that we cite above. As an editorial team, we also committed ourselves to a Black feminist ethic of mentorship. BTPC is not only about Blackness (Black culture, experiences, scholarship, and lives), it also calls for us to account for the editorial methods and practices we used to usher this scholarship to publication, to amplify and celebrate Black scholars. This required a different approach to advocacy and mentorship. Oftentimes, the labor of mentorship is hidden; here we choose to make it apparent. In this issue, we modeled what it means to support Black scholars. Supporting Black scholars requires a shift from allyship, which is often enacted as “I agree with you privately, but I will not challenge the system that oppresses you publicly,” to what Love (2019) calls being a coconspirator (p. 117). Coconspirators advocate for and assist and are willing to risk something in the fight for social justice and equality. The challenge for the field lies, as it always has, in divesting from the impulse to center the white, patriarchal, cisgender, male experience (and all the other oppressions and -isms that come with marginalization) so others’ voices can be realized and acknowledged as always having been and continuing to be a part of TPC. And, ironically whether the field wants to divest or not, the move toward inclusion can’t be stopped, and scholars, such as ourselves, are committed to defining our spaces, places, communities, and practices for ourselves. Love (2019) reminds us that “We are not asking for struggle; we just understand that justice will not happen without it” (p. 9). So, in the words of Public Enemy, “We have to fight the powers that be.” Fists to the sky, this unapologetically, pro-Black special issue takes up that call.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Natasha N. Jones

In 2020, the Black Technical and Professional Task force, constituted by Dr. Vershawn A. Young and led by Dr. Temptaous Mckoy (Bowie State University), published a statement and resource list that aimed to amplify the work of Black technical communicators and Black technical communication scholars. The task force included scholars Drs. Natasha N. Jones (Michigan State University), Cecilia Shelton (University of Maryland), Donnie Johnson Sackey (University of Texas, Austin), Kimberly Harper (North Carolina A&T State University), Ja’La Wourman (James Madison University), and graduate student Constance Haywood (Michigan State University).