Critical Approaches to Climate Justice, Technology, and Technical Communication Special Issue Introduction

ABSTRACT

This special issue amplifies the contributions of technical communicators working on climate justice initiatives across the Majority World. By Majority World, we refer not to a specific geography but to the conditions in which most of humanity lives: lacking economic, social, and/or political agency, and absent adequate institutional access to critical infrastructures. The articles in this issue make explicit the need for TPC scholars to rethink, update, and engage in spaces of environmental injustice.

KEYWORDS:

• Science communication/environmental communication
• Climate change
• Technology

Introduction

As we write this introduction, researchers from the Institute for Public Policy Research and Chatham House in the United Kingdom released a study reporting that our world is now at risk of descending into a climate “doom loop,” a dystopian world where simply coping with escalating climate impacts will absorb all the resources that might otherwise prevent them altogether (Laybourn, Throp, & Sherman, 2023, p. 5). Additionally, Ohio’s governor Mike DeWine redefined natural gas as a source of green energy in signed legislation that will expand opportunities for fossil fuel extraction from state parks (Zuckerman, 2023). Several states in the West are fighting over dwindling Colorado river reserves (James, 2023). The now-canceled Byhalia Pipeline, which routed through the southwest part of Memphis, reminds us how industry repeatedly targets and exploits communities already burdened with pollution (Sainz, 2021), while a depleted and traumatized Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the U.S. regulatory body meant to manage such burdens and violations, struggles to enact its mission, having suffered an exodus of scientists and policy experts under the Trump administration (Friedman, 2023). Perhaps most alarmingly, the scientific community believes the Amazon might have reached its “tipping point,” the point at which the loss of biodiversity is so great that it may become a grassy savanna, which would have profound climate consequences worldwide (Boulton, Lenton, & Boers, 2022).

Indeed, current evidence suggests that a sixth major extinction of global biological diversity is already well underway (Díaz et al., 2019; Monroe, Butchart, Mooers, & Bokma, 2019) with the Earth losing between one and ten percent of its biodiversity every decade, mostly due to land-use/change-induced habitat loss; pollution; over-harvesting; extreme weather events; and diseases related to human population growth, production, and overconsumption (United Nations Environmental Programme, 2019). Since species are linked to ecosystems, as one goes extinct, others with which they interact are likely to also go extinct.

The interdependence of species has severe implications for humans generally, but the impact of biodiversity loss will be greatest for Majority World peoples who have minimal access to resources but have historically contributed less than the minority world per capita, and in the aggregate, to climate change (Costello et al., 2009). For example, industrial hog operations in eastern North Carolina disproportionately harm Black, Latino, and Indigenous communities (Wing & Johnston, 2014) and the increasing number of people in developing regions now live in “low-elevation coastal zones” and deltas, which are more exposed to effects of climate change like sea level rise and river flooding due to increased rain (Islam & Winkel, 2017, p. 13). Compounding the issue is that many of these regions are rural, where the incidence of poverty is already much higher than in non-rural areas.

Despite making lower contributions to climate change and its adverse effects than their minority world counterparts, Majority World peoples remain historically absent and underrepresented in decision-making activities that significantly impact the earth’s climate and ability to adapt to those changes. For instance, the historic marginalization of women and Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) has had significant impacts on access to land, credit, agricultural extension services, and, importantly, technology that can aid in adaptations. Such institutionalized discrimination means that women, BIPOC, and low-income communities are often less involved in food system planning, policy, decision making, and technology design despite overwhelming evidence that when they are included in these conversations, outcomes are more just and lasting, and technological interventions are more effective and useful (Ban et al., 2018; Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2011).

While the wickedness (Horst & Webber, 1973) of problems resulting from or exacerbated by anthropogenic climate change causes some to abandon hope or deny scientific evidence and dodge personal responsibility, other researchers, activists, and entrepreneurs are turning toward the “trouble” (Haraway, 2010, p. 1). As this special issue highlights, scholars working at the intersections of environmental justice and technical and professional communication (TPC) are lending their expertise to these initiatives and studying how movements create the conditions where environmental justice can flourish and highlighting the areas where more work is to be done.

Focus of the issue

In this special issue of Technical Communication Quarterly, we highlight the contributions of technical communicators working on climate justice initiatives across the Majority World. By Majority World, we refer not to a specific geography but to the conditions in which most of humanity lives: lacking economic, social, and/or political agency, and absent adequate institutional access to critical infrastructures for food, housing, transportation, and communications. Such spaces of marginalization are often identified with Asian, African, and South American regions that have been traditionally classified as “developing,” “low- or middle-income,” or “the Global South.” Yet, marginalization occurs in, and climate justice matters for rural Appalachia and urban Silicon Valley as in any other part of the world. Therefore, we have chosen “Majority World” in lieu of deficit-oriented terms to acknowledge the fact that marginalization occurs across geographies, and we invited submissions that engaged with efforts to improve access to human and environmental rights for marginalized communities regardless of their geographical location.

Access to safe work, shelter, food, and environmental health are universal and fundamental human rights. Yet, the enjoyment of these rights by the Majority World is inequitable in comparison to the minority world (Boyd, 2021). As the title of this special issue suggests, we were interested in the ways that technical communicators were engaging in the research, teaching, and scholarship of climate justice, but we were equally interested in the activist work they may be doing on their campuses, in their local communities, and with their students.

The 1997 special winter issue of Technical Communication Quarterly by Bill Karis and Jimmie Killingsworth demonstrated the intimate, if imprecise, connection between the fields of technical and environmental communication. In the nearly three decades that followed, many TPC scholars and practitioners extended and updated these discussions, but there remains an urgent need for solutions and applications that our field is, perhaps, uniquely positioned to offer.¹ Very recent scholarship demonstrates the impacts that TPC scholars can have when they engage the environmental justice space as it relates to human-centered, participatory, and co-design methodologies in TPC (Bannon & Ehn, 2013; Moore & Elliott, 2016; Rose, 2016; Spinuzzi, 2005; Walton, 2016)); social justice (Acharya, 2017; Agboka, 2013; Walton, Moore, & Jones, 2019); feminist theory (Flynn, 1997; Frost, 2016; Lay, 1991); food and environmental justice (Cagle, 2017; Opel & Sackey, 2019; Sackey, 2018); and, transnational development discourse (Agboka, 2014; Haas, 2012; Opel & Stevenson, 2015). We believe the articles in this issue make explicit the need for TPC scholars to continue to rethink, update, and relentlessly engage in spaces of environmental injustice, and we hope this issue will add to the growing body of TPC scholarship that does exactly that.

Summary of articles

In the article “Expanding the Scope and Scale of Risk in TPC: Water Access and the Colorado River Basin,” Ehren Pflugfelder, Timothy Amidon, Donnie Sackey, and Daniel Richards argue that approaches toward risk within the field of TPC ought to engage more critically with the historical evolution of the field as an industrial professional. Pflugfelder et al. present a spatial and temporal framework through which the field has engaged risk and argue that it must be reimagined in order to address environmental inequalities, meet climate goals, and redistribute climate risk more equitably between the Majority and Minority world. The piece was inspired by the writers’ desires to integrate a more holistic ethical model for how scholars and practitioners think about risk and disaster case studies. This piece was also inspired by Amidon’s personal experience living in the foothills of the Colorado River Basin where, he said, it became painfully clear that the water diversion and management practices of Western states is simply unsustainable and rooted in injustice.

In the article “Infrastructural Storytelling: A Methodological Approach for Narrating Environmental (In)Justice in Technical and Professional Communication,” Dustin Edwards, Bridget Gelms, and Richard Shivener report their use of a novel “infrastructural storytelling” methodology that details how “Big Tech” sustainability reports tend to downplay the personal, fragmented and political stakes of their infrastructures. Writing about locations of personal significance like Google in San Francisco and Digital Reality in Toronto, their study dismantles and counters the clean aesthetics and detached rhetoric of Big Tech sustainability reports, shining a light on the fraught intersections between the practice of technical writing, the materiality of digital infrastructures, and the goals of climate justice. Their article offers scholars a new way to prioritize community-based perspectives on digital infrastructure. Their hope is that the piece will give other scholars a way of thinking about digital rhetoric and TPC research that prioritizes community-based perspectives on digital infrastructures, and they recognize storytelling methodologies as deeply rooted in the ongoing conversations around justice in our field.

In the third research article of the special issue, “Community-Engaged Translation: Disrupting Textual Regimes of Climate Disaster Recovery Governance,” Soyeon Lee leverages her identity as a multilingual transnational person to examine the rhetorical practices of transnational multilingual communities of color around a climate disaster relief program. Using ethnographic data from an 18-month study, Lee argues that community-engaged translation practices operate as the locus of rhetorical strategies in multilingual disaster communication contexts. The article also discusses the obligations that justice requires when scholars and teachers act as rhetorical mediators between government and non-governmental stakeholders in an effort to transform power structures that would otherwise bracket members of multilingual communities as non-normative citizens. Lee’s work was inspired by her own lived experience of navigating a climate disaster as a multilingual transnational person.

Savannah Paige Murray begins our case study section with “POWHR to the People: Fighting for Climate Justice and Opposing the Mountain Valley Pipeline in Appalachia,” which follows the ongoing opposition to a natural gas pipeline in the Appalachian region in connection with the Protect Our Water, Heritage, Rights (POWHR) coalition. Using ethnographic observations, participant interviews, and digital interface analysis of POWHR’s website and social media presence, Paige Murray explores the ways in which Appalachian activists and their allies fight for a more sustainable future for themselves and their communities. Her hope for this piece is to inspire more teacher-scholars to examine rural environmentalism and to reconsider who counts as an environmentalist, especially when examining environmental issues in Appalachia.

In “The Use and Misuse of Indigenous Science,” Ehren Pflugfelder, Olivia Goodfriend, and Carlee Baker turn their attention to the term “Indigenous science” (IS) and show that while the term increasingly appears in popular and scholarly literature, there has been little study of how it’s actually employed. This information is valuable to the field, they argue, as we find ourselves called to expose and redress (as opposed to simply recognize) colonial and appropriative legacies in the framing of “expert” knowledge. Using rhetorical content analysis, their case study examines U.S.-based news articles and finds that IS is rarely defined, referenced superficially, and inconsistent in quoting Indigenous people.

In the third case study of this special issue, “(re)Locating the Decision Makers in Ecotourism: Emphasizing ‘Place’ and ‘Grace’ in a Global Industry’s DEI Efforts,” Wesley Mathis suggests that ecotourism companies are in a unique position to hire locally and equitably to improve their DEI recruitment practices, but finds that inclusive hiring practices are easier to enact on the ground than they are at corporate headquarters. To design this study, Mathis drew upon his time working at Natural Habitat Adventures as a national park guide and plans to continue researching risk communication through a cultural-rhetorical lens.

In the last case study of the issue, “A Communicational Disconnect: Establishing Superordinate Identities in Climate Communication through Transgenerational Responsibility,” Aylin Lehnert, Sara Doody, Justin Steinburg, and Ashley Rose Mehlenbacher discuss intergenerational aspects of climate (in)justice. Contemporary discourses of blame focus on the failures of previous generations to protect, preserve, and heed scientific warnings around climate change. But these authors argue that lasting climate action requires rhetorical alliances, not adversarial framing. As the case study shows, it’s more effective to build alliances through cooperation based on shared identities and similarities, rather than differences. As the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changes synthesis report underscores, scientists and activists face challenging conversations around climate change and establishing effective approaches to climate communication can increase awareness of the urgency to act and motivate groups to become part of the transformation.

Conclusion

Our contributors demonstrate the necessity for approaching climate work through justice-driven frameworks that are both theoretical and applied. We have come to the kairotic moment when the scholarship of TPC and the voices of its activists can and are being heard. We can and are effecting change. We can and continue to stay with the trouble. But there is more work to do.

We hope the articles in this issue help TPC scholars, practitioners, and teachers envision new directions and new collaborations in climate justice work, especially the work that centralizes the experiences of multiply marginalized communities across the Majority World. We hope readers finish this special issue feeling empowered, emboldened, and inspired to step into the fray. Climate justice is a long game but, as Washington State Governor Lee Islee said, “We are the first generation to feel the sting of climate change, and we are the last generation that can do something about it” (Ta, 2019).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sarah Beth Hopton

Sarah Beth Hopton is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Writing at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. Her research focuses on the intersections of climate justice, technology, and technical communication. Her article, “All Vietnamese Men are Brothers,” co-authored with Dr. Rebecca Walton, won the 2019 CCCCs award for best qualitative and quantitative research. Currently, she is working with the Vietnamese Bee Research Center on localizing and customizing an application to track the effects of climate change on pollinators. Also a nonfiction author, Sarah Beth’s memoir Blood, Bone, Breath, Earth was recently shortlisted for the Bridport Prize.

Prashant Rajan

Prashant Rajan is a senior user researcher in the Research & Insights group at Salesforce. His research interests include the social and ethical implications of technology use for human development. Prashant conducts ethnographic, survey, and archival research on user attitudes and behaviors.

Notes

1. Refer to: Coppola and Karis’s (2000) Technical Communication, Deliberative Rhetoric and Environmental Discourse: Connections and Directions; Rude’s (2000) special issue “The Discourse of Public Policy;” Johnson-Sheehan and Stewart’s (2003) Science and Nature Writing; Dubinsky’s and Carpenter (2004) Civic Engagement; Gross and Gurak’s (Gross & Gurak, 2005) The State of Rhetoric of Science and Technology; Waddell’s (1998) Landmark Essays on Rhetoric and the Environment; and Gibson’s (2008) Science and Public Policy, and newer work from Simmons and Zoetewey (2012), Walsh (2015), and Cagle and Tillery (2015).