Jennifer Sano-Franchini: So, hi, I'm Jennifer Sano-Franchini, my pronouns are she/her/hers
and I'm Associate Professor of English and Director of Professional and
Technical Writing at Virginia Tech. And I just want to begin this event with a
land acknowledgement. Although we've come together today from many different
places, many of the resources that made this event possible are coming from
Virginia Tech. And I want to acknowledge the land-based history that's
contributed to our ability to come together today.
Virginia Tech rests on the traditional homelands of the Tutelo/Monacan people
who have a continuing connection to the land Virginia Tech currently occupies.
Our presence on this land is a consequence of colonization, forced
displacement and genocide of indigenous people. Virginia Tech also sits on
former plantation land worked by enslaved Black people, including the Fraction
McNorton and Saunders families, amongst numerous others, who contributed to
the creation and emergence of Virginia Tech as a major land-grant university.
Although a land acknowledgement alone is not enough, it's an
important social justice practice that makes visible the history and ongoing
effects of systemic inequality in our society. With this recognition, we commit to
educating ourselves about the local histories of the places we occupy,
contextualizing our learning by deeply engaging with Native American and Black
intellectual traditions, and attending to the impacts of our actions and our work
on Black, Indigenous and other minoritized communities.
On that note, I'm very excited that we have seven esteemed panelists who will
be speaking with you about Black technical and professional communication.
We will have introductions, spend the bulk of our time with our panelists
presentations, and we'll have some time for Q & A at the end. So please feel free
to enter any questions that come up in the Q & A box— you should see a button
at the bottom of your zoom screen, if you don't already see it.
Please note that this event is being recorded. And a quick note for those of you on social
media at the bottom left of the slide is the hashtag for this event, #BlackTechComm.
So this event was organized as a response to national calls for action
against anti-Blackness and white supremacy across domains, especially those
that arose in response to the unjust and brutal murders of Breonna Taylor,
Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, and Tony McDade earlier this year.
For instance, this past summer, the ATTW, or Association of Teachers of
Technical Writing President Angela Haas issued a call to action for non-Black
members in particular to take steps to redress anti-Blackness within our spheres
of influence. This call was followed by another by ATTW
Vice President and our panelist Natasha N. Jones and ATTW Fellow Miriam F.
Williams, who called for the just use of imagination that, quote, supports the
deconstruction and abolishment of oppressive practices, systems, and institutions.
They go on to explain that, quote, a just use of imagination is not destructive
even as it seeks to dismantle, because using imagination in this way also
calls for the replacement of oppressive practices with systems that are
founded on equality, access and opportunity.
In response to these calls within our profession, we in the Professional
and Technical Writing program at Virginia Tech, started a working group to
address anti-Blackness in Professional and Technical Writing, and our
conversations led to the idea of an event like the one we are at today. So thank
you to all who participated in this group. In addition, the Conference on College Composition
and Communication, or CCCC, released the CCCC Black Technical and
Professional Communication Position Statement with Resource Guide, composed
by our panelists. So many units across Virginia Tech came together
to make this event possible, and I want to thank the Black Cultural Center,
College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences, Center for Humanities, Engineering
Communications Program and Materials Science and Engineering Diversity
Committee, the Composition Program Writing Center, Center for Educational
Networks and Impacts, Center for Communicating Science, and Engineering
Communication Center. Special thanks to Sylvester Johnson, Joe Forte
of Athenaeum, Kristen Cox and Sheila Carter-Tod, who've met with me and
provided guidance and support in the organizing of this event.
I will now turn it over to Dr. Carter-Tod, who will be introducing the moderators
for today.
Sheila Carter-Tod: Thanks Jen. Today, as Jen mentioned, you will be able to submit
questions through the question and answer button below on your screen.
We have three graduate students who have volunteered to moderate our session
for us. First up, we have Matt Homer, he's a PhD student
in our Rhetoric and Writing program that focuses on Native Hawaiian communication
practices, especially in response to the colonial reality of the
modern techno, of modern technology as a form of technical communication.
Next up is our moderator, we have Chloe Robertson. Chloe is also another
student in our PhD program in Rhetoric and Writing. Chloe's research interests
are immigration documentation and communities. She's currently working on a
book review of Rhetorical Crossovers by Cedric Burrows and Linguistic Justice
by April Baker Bell. Our third moderator is Luana Shafer. Luana
is also a doctoral student in our PhD program. Luana focuses on addiction, alcoholism,
and digital rhetoric. Specifically, she aims to analyze the embodied
rhetoric of lived experiences within physical and digital community spaces
for alcoholism support and recovery groups. She hopes to contribute to
medical rhetoric conversations concerning patient advocacy and ethos.
As mentioned earlier, Jen has set up a session for us to tweet if you have
something you want to send out, there will be other people that will also be
tweeting.But to reminder, the hashtag is #BlackTechComm with a capitalized B,
T, and C. And with that, I will turn it over to Chloe
Robertson, who will be introducing our panelists.
Chloe Robertson: Thank you, Dr. Carter-Tod. So I'd like to start our introductions today
with Kimberly C. Harper who is an Assistant Professor of English at North Carolina
Agricultural and Technical State University, where she directs the Technical
Writing concentration for the Department of English. She created the monthly
maternal health and reproductive justice podcast, The Space of
Grace. And her work focuses on social justice, race, ethos and technical
and professional communication, maternal health rhetoric, mental health, and
hip-hop discourse. She recently published her new book, The Ethos of Black
Motherhood in America: Only White Women Get Pregnant.
Constance Haywood is a third-year PhD student in the Writing, Rhetoric and
American Cultures department at Michigan State University. She's interested in
Black feminist rhetorics and literacies, online community building, and digital
research ethics. Natasha N. Jones is an Assistant Professor
at Michigan State University in the Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures department.
She is also the current Vice President for the Association of Teachers
of Technical Writing, and has won the CCCC Best Article in Technical and Scientific
Communication Award in 2020, 2018, and 2014, and the Nell Ann Pickett
Award in 2017. Temptaous Mckoy is an Assistant Professor
of English with a specialty in technical communication at Bowie State University.
She recently won the CFSHRC Dissertation Award and serves as an
associate editor for the Peitho journal. Her work challenges the field of
TPC to be more inclusive of informal, communicative and learning practices such
as those in Black communities and HBCUs.
Donnie Johnson Sackey is an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Writing at the
University of Texas at Austin and a Senior Researcher with Detroit Integrated
Vision for Environmental Research through Science and Engagement, D-VERSE.
He has worked with the Michigan Environmental Justice Coalition. And his work
focuses on environmental public policy deliberation, environmental justice, and
environmental community-based participatory research.
Cecilia D. Shelton is an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Writing at the
University of Maryland. Her research focuses on uplifting and prioritizing the
voices of Black folks and others structured into the margins in order to promote
equitable solutions to social, political, and structural problems.
And lastly, Ja'La Wourman is a doctoral candidate in the Writing, Rhetoric, and
American Cultures program at Michigan State University. She's a King-Chavez-
Parks, KCP, Future Faculty Fellow and recipient of the 2020 Excellence Award in
Interdisciplinary Scholarship for her work in Tanzania, East Africa with the
Tanzania partnership program at Michigan State University.
Thank you all for listening, and I will now turn over to our wonderful panelists.
Temptaous Mckoy: Hello everybody, how are y'all doin' today?
I don't know if they can talk back to me, okay, but I see in the chat, like y'all
jumping down there so hey, y'all. Good afternoon, my name is Temptaous Mckoy,
Chair of the CCCC Black Technical and Professional Communication Task
Force, and we are absolutely elated to be here with you guys today.
So I'm gonna go ahead and share my screen which has the slides on them. Bear
with me one second. Alright, I'mma go and hit present. Boom.
So, you know, this always throws me o ff even when I'm teaching my students.
So, can everyone see the slides currently? Are we good on slides? Now,
whatch'all lookin' at? No? Desktop two, go to desktop two. Okay, here
we go. This can we get it? Are we good now? See? Again.
It—aye, it happens to all of us, alright. Well, welcome to the party.
So I'm going to be very brief in introducing what we're going to talk about here
today 'cause I want to make sure we have time for everyone to ask any
questions and things of that nature as well. So again, if you're tweeting out on Twitter,
Instagram, and everything else, the hashtag is #BlackTechComm, as well as #BlackTPC.
So you can use either or both hashtags in order to thread this conversation
together. And again, we want to thank Virginia Tech
for havin' us here as well. So forming the Black Technical and Professional
Communication Task Force. So I just want to give you guys a little
bit of background information on how this came together before we jump into
everyone's work, if thas alright. So, the conversation was really between CCCC
Chair Vershawn Ashanti Young and I at NCTE 2019.
So in Baltimore, just having a conversation about how Black technical and
professional communication should be brought more to the forefront and the
ways that we could go about doing that. So he asks me, you know, who would be some
great people that we would love to have on the Black Task Force to do this,
and of course, I thought of those who were not only in my research network and
things of that nature, but I wanted to make sure we tapped into Black technical
and professional communication scholars that has specific research
interests and specific contributions to the field of technical and
professional communication, and that we're were much more explicit in their calls
for Black technical and professional communication as well. And I want to make
sure I highlight that because obviously there are so many of us, right.
But everyone can't be on the committee. But I just want to kind of bring
in a little bit on how we were able to select who was on the committee.
For those of you who may not have seen the research statement, which we do
have plugged here below, I will place the link to the presentation in the chat box
momentarily. Black TPC is defined as including practices
centered on Black community and culture and/or rhetorical practices
inherent in Black lived experiences. Black TPC reflects the cultural,
economic, social, and political experiences of Black people across the diaspora.
It also include the work of scholars in the academy and the contributions
of practitioners. In all, Black TPC contextualize the experiences and cultures
of Black people, through research, teaching, and scholarship.
So we wanted to make sure that we gave you all a working definition as you
move forward, to understand and utilize Black TPC.
One more thing as I move on, the the Communication's Position Statement and
Resource Guide is available even if you just do a quick Google in NCTE, CCC
Black Technical Professional Communication, it'll be one of your first hits. I
charge you all to make sure that not only you read the statement, but also read
the letter that Vershawn Young and I penned together to our audience.
It was important and critical that instead of just giving everyone the position
statement that we actually gave you all a resource guide to begin your research
and to move forward. So with that said, I'm going to go ahead and
turn the floor over to Donnie Sackey.
Black User Experience Design Donnie Johnson Sackey: Hi everyone, thank
you for having me today and coming and listening to us speak.
Can you advance to the next slide, please, Temptaous?
Thank you. So I spend a lot of time thinking about how
design can improve environments and our relationship with environments and
subsequently our relationships with each other.
So I've been pretty preoccupied in my research and teaching with thinking about
how we can, as designers, address problems through writing based technical
interventions via document or mobile application design.
My contribution today is to ask you to consider what would it mean to think of
user experience design through a race-conscious lens, particularly an
Afrocentric lens. My decision to ask you to do so is a means
to get you to consider the ways in which our approach to design through an apparent
race-neutral lens is in fact an approach that privileges whiteness.
Consider this. Why do digital assistants for Apple and Android
operating system sound white? Or why did Apple's iOS 8 update with racially
inclusive emojis still receive backlash from users of color?
Or why do darker skinned people experience more difficulty using automatic
soap dispensers? I offer these provocations to highlight a
concern. Black people are rarely seen as users or designers of technology, which comes
with a heavy price. This is primarily caused by a lack of racial
diversity in tech. These problems I've highlighted are also largely
the result of mostly, if not entirely white design teams unintentionally
making discriminatory design decisions. For example, the example that I
gave of the soap dispenser was the result of technical concepts— a global manufacturer
of restroom hygiene systems, not bothering to test its dispensers
on non-white users.
But these incidents aren't exactly isolated. Next slide, please?
In 2015, a Black software developer alerted Google via Twitter that its
service, Google Photos, labeled photos of him and another friend, as gorillas.
Google's corrective to the problem was to censor searches on its service for the
terms gorilla, chimp and monkey. Next slide?
In 2017, Face App, a photo editing service designed by a Moscow based team
drew attention on account of a feature, labeled as a hotness filter. Many users of
color criticized the feature because it lightened darker skin tones to achieve the
desiring beauty effect. Rather than remove the feature from app, designers
opted to change the filters label from hotness to spark.
In both these cases, it's likely that the design teams didn't train their algorithms
on diverse enough datasets. Nevertheless, that doesn't address larger questions
as to whether these features should exist or how can we develop robust
systems of AI accountability in order to ensure that we're not encoding racism
and white supremacy into our technology. I realize that some correctives had
been to diversify design teams by bringing more people of color into the design
process and broadening the picture of what users look like.
Next slide, please? But still, beyond bodies in the room, we need
to consider the tools that bodies use to facilitate experiences and environments.
I want us to consider the heuristics that guide our design processes
and how seemingly a-cultural approaches to design, or in fact cultural
and preloaded with biases that marginalize the humanity of Black people and
eradicates our perspectives. I've really been interested in this idea of
de-marginalizing Black user experience through Afrocentricity as a design heuristic,
user experience design from the perspective of Black, technical and professional
communication taps into Molefi Asanti's concept of Afrocentricity by placing
the suppressed histories and experiences of the Black diaspora at the center
of evaluating the social, economic, and political aspects of design.
These perspectives have been mostly driven by practitioners who push against
the marginalization of Black lived experience in design thinking. Their
perspectives encouraged us to consider design as it positively impacts and
emerges from the needs of the Black community. Afrocentric design is a
recursive process that acknowledges designers as cultural beings who Charles
Thomas notes, have the authorization to bless and damn as knowledge brokers.
Afrocentric design is guided by six ethical principles that acknowledge
the designer's responsibility as a transformative healer; demonstrate deep
respect for spirituality; embrace the importance of agreement and consensus;
acknowledge the necessity of dialogue, particularity, individuality, cooperation,
and solidarity as part of an iterative design process; and promote self-determination
and rebirth. To contextualize some of these values, I'd
like you to consider these questions at the bottom as heuristics and how they may
apply to the examples of unintentional, discriminatory design I offered
earlier. Beyond the inclusions of people of color in the design process, what
if designers rigorously questioned the value and impact of a specific design
feature on communities beyond their ideal users? What would it mean to make community
stakeholders a part the design process beyond their roles as users?
Or, what would it mean for designers to walk away entirely from ideas
that community stakeholders acknowledge as harmful during the design process?
Next slide please? There are a handful of Black user experience
designers who are doing this work already. I quickly want to acknowledge
two women, Amber Nechole Hart is a user experience designer based out
of Georgia, who spent a lot of time exploring how Black perspectives and responses
to past, current, and future realities can influence design, creating more
conscious, innovative, and more importantly, inclusive work. I'm also really
moved by the work of Jacquelyn Iyamah, who is a user experience and product
designer based in San Francisco. Jacqueline has done work on communication
projects that improved public access in housing in Baltimore. I'm also interested
in her thesis project, which is a conceptual design for an app-based service
called allay, which seeks to improve mental health care access for Black,
Indigenous, and People of Color by attending to distrust and stigma in healthcare
institutions, cultural competency of therapists, and the accessibility
of mental health resources. She's also the founder of Black UX Collective,
which is a platform that highlights the work and experiences of Black user designers.
And so. My time is up, but I'm happy to talk more about like these two
wonderful women and their work and also further think about how Afrocentricity
can guide our approaches to design. So thank you.
Ja’La Wourman: Thank you, Donnie. Can everyone hear me? Thumbs up.
So, Donnie kind of got us situated to think about UX and Black user experience.
My name is Ja'La Wourman, and today I'll be talking about Black
entrepreneurship and technical communication. This is also a focal point of my dissertation,
which I'm currently working on. So you guys will get just a little snapshot,
snapshot of some of the key things that I had been discovering in my research and why
I believe that this is important to the work of technical communicators and writing
studies scholars. Next slide.
So to begin I want to play this preview clip of a film that came out in 2019 on
Netflix, She Did That. African-American women are the country's fastest-growing
group. These are the women who are raising the glass
ceiling. "I'm a product of people who were committed
to seeing me thrive." Dreamers.
"Could I have lost everything? Yes.” Doers.
"The Superwoman complex is real." Risk takers.
"I have a Master's degree, you're asking me to print out agenda? I'm
done." "You don't get to diminish my hard work."
"The banks are not as excited to give us money." "The backlash was, we're selling out."
"This is a time for us to begin to build our own table."
What's the secret? "It's really just a matter of, you know, having
the guts to do it." How did she get there?
"To say that you went from your kitchen to being a part of the largest
beauty company in the world?" Take a step in her shoes to see, she did that.
So as the trailer said, African American women are the country's
fastest growing group of entrepreneurs. So this film—you can go back...
The film focuses on Luvvie Ajayi, she's an author and digital strategist, Lisa
Price, who's a natural hair care founder of Carol's Daughter, Melissa Butler,
founder of cosmetics line The Lip Bar, and Tonya Rapley the founder of My Fab
Finance. So why entrepreneurship? Next slide?
So historically Black entrepreneurship has meant opportunities for equality,
equity and a vehicle out of poverty. Throughout the years Black entrepreneurs
have harnessed economic power to strengthen the Black community.
While many scholars approach technical and professional communication work
from industry-related practices and workplace settings, something that I do as
well, there's a growing need to understand how individuals have taken it upon
themselves to solve problems with innovative solutions. Now this is why we can
look towards entrepreneur writing and company design practices to understand
their experiences and their methods. There's a lack of attention to the women,
though, at the forefront of the entrepreneur movement. Not only in Black
communities throughout the United States, but globally.
So throughout my section, a key concept I want to leave in your minds
is research in Black entrepreneurship means addressing multiple layers of
oppression that ultimately lead to innovative solutions and technological
advancements. So when I say this, I don't want us to be
left with a deficit mindset. I want you guys to know that although Black entrepreneurs
and women and other Black individuals who have created businesses and
are designing these companies, they recognize the oppression that is before
them, but that propels them to think of innovative solutions which are technological
advancements. Next slide.
So the need, culturally centered, inclusive practices.
So my interests in this really stemmed out of, Adam Banks' 2005 book
Race, Rhetoric and Technology, and a passage that I like that he states is,
"Those of us who care about ending systemic oppression must design new
spaces, even as we point out the problems in our current ones. So when I read
that, I instantly began to think about what does it look like to imagine new
spaces that confront these systems that have kept a lot of marginalized Black
and Brown and minority people silent, basically. Now Dr. Natasha Jones, who
was also on this Task Force, in 2017, her study revealed that Black
entrepreneurs' awareness of the possibilities and potential for acting in and
pushing back against oppressive ideological structures and discriminant—
discriminatory economic systems was very much apparent in the work that they
do. So I bring that up and I put these two quotes
next to each other just to say that although we need to begin to think up imaginative—
imaginatory spaces, Black entrepreneurs and Black people are very much
aware of what is against them, and they are up to the task to create new
spaces. The advent of social media and the digital
era, however, represents the potential for the continuation of reclaiming media spaces,
as sites of Black intellectualism and rhetorical practices in digital and public
spaces traditionally not recognized in writing studies scholarship.
So this is something that me and my co-author, Shingi Mavima, we
described in our recent piece, and a example of this that I want to highlight is
Blavity, Inc. So to the right, I'm going to be discussing
a company that I've kind of focused on over the years. Blavity, Inc. is a millennial
technology company, a media tech company that is home to five brands. So within
this company, they create user-generated content that centered on Black voices and
community issues across the diaspora. So this models an Afrocentric
approach. Now their brands reaches between 400 thousand to 3 million users between
the five. And I bring up this company because it addresses what does it
mean to imagine a space where we are directly confronting these oppressive
systems that have tried to silence our voices? What do we do? We create new spaces.
Next slide. Blavity was founded by Morgan DeBaun.
And if you look to the right, you see the five brands. Shadow and Act which is
media and film, Travel Noire which is a travel company, 21 Ninety, which is a
women's empowerment brand, Blavity News, which highlights news in the Black
community. Blavity Politics, which highlights politics within the Black community
and issues that we care about, and Afro Tech, which is directly centered for
technology and Black tech designers. Next slide.
Looking ahead, Black feminism as an intersectional approach, what does this all
mean? So shifts in our understanding of what counts
as knowledge means is applying methods that are centered on social justice
outcomes, but also looking to other fields to see what discussions have been overlooked
within our own field. Building on the social justice turn, we can
look towards Black feminism as methodological framework when researching
Black entrepreneurship in physical and digital spaces.
So for me, when I think about these spaces, Black entrepreneurship, I think
about it's more than just writing. It's more than just looking at how they have
designed the company. It's examining the experiences and the narratives that
come with each entrepreneur and what it took for them to create this space.
What can we learn and what, how can that inform us as we're doin' research in
the workplace and in business structures. And I want to leave you guys with intersectionality,
which was a term coined by Kimberly Crenshaw in 1989. Intersectionality,
a term coined by Kimberly Crenshaw, helps us describe how the
identities we carry, our gender, class, sexuality, religion, location, and
many others inform our experiences. Thus, understanding why a Black feminist framework
means careful analysis of the intersecting, interacting, mitigating
ways that these categories shape our experiences and can ultimately help Black
women entrepreneurs along the way. So some questions for you guys to consider
that you might want to address during the Q & A section is what role might
community, race, and identity play when researching entrepreneurship and technical
and professional communication? And two, how does this current
moment that we are in shift our methodological approach to conducting research
for businesses and organizations?
Thank you.
Kimberly Harper: Good afternoon, everyone. Can you hear me? Thumbs up. Okay,
awesome. My name is Kim Harper and today I'm going
to talk to you all about Black rhetorics of health communication.
We are experiencing a national moment where there's a lot of discussion about
Black maternal health, and we hear the statistic that Black women are three to
four times more likely to die in childbirth than white women, regardless of a
Black women's access to education, her income, and the best medical care.
And so for me as I began, to think critically about Black maternal health, I
thought about the larger discussion of the Black Lives Matter movement. And
this understanding that Black lives do not matter in this country, because Black
wombs, the source of Black life, does not matter.
And so historically in American society, we have a place where Black people
only matter if we're adding value to the economy. So 400 years of chattel slavery where free
labor is being provided. Then you have the sharecropping system where
people are still impoverished. They are free, but they are economically disadvantaged
and enslaved, and now we have the prison industrial complex that
Michelle Alexander writes about in her book, The New Jim Crow.
And so when I really dove into, why are Black women dying, why do we have
medical disparities in our communities, I came to the conclusion of race and
racism. So there are issues that we have to attend to.
And after having my own birth trauma and giving birth to a beautiful daughter
eight years ago, I realized that it's really the image and the ethos of the Black
community and Black women and Black motherhood that plays a role in how
we, why, why the health care that we receive, is not what it should be.
And so as a result of that, I created Black rhetorics of health
communication, BRHC for short, and Black rhetorics of health communication
builds on scholarship from a number of areas which include rhetoric of health
care, rhetoric of health and medicine, technical and professional
communication, and a lot of other adjacent fields.
But it explicitly focuses on the experiences of Black patients and is grounded in
the African rhetorical concept of nomo, which acknowledges the power of the
word. So your word is your bond. We've heard that before. You are required to
be truthful and honest and the word both written and spoken have the power to
bring good into our worlds. And so BRHC scholars seek to bring together
academics, community organizations and health care professionals
to discuss the design delivery and effects of written and oral medical discourses
on Black patients. And finally, BRHC scholarship seeks to redress
social injustices within the medical system.
Next slide, please. And so BRHC scholarship cites Black scholars
who are not traditionally in TPC or RHM, and those adjacent fields,
so if you've read the CCCC statement, there's a list of resources there
as Temptaous said earlier, but I want to draw your attention to a few additional
ones. Toni Morrison's work is paramount to what we do with BRHC scholarship
because she talks about the fabricated African presence in literature
and that can extend into TPC and what we're doing in medical discourse.
Also, the idea that we are constantly trying to prove that racism exists. It is, it is
a distraction. And so we have to move away from that and began to just really
do the work. Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body and
Harriet Washington, Medical Apartheid are also two cornerstone works in
this framework. And when we talk about histories, theories,
and methodologies, of course, Ja'La mentioned intersectionality and Kimberly Crenshaw,
Chester M. Pierce who coined the term racial microaggressions, and
Loretta Ross, she, along with 12 other Black women, started the reproductive
justice movement, which is the right to have children, the right not to have
children by way of access to abortion, safe abortion services and contraceptives
and then a right to raise your children in safe and healthy environments,
and so while all three of those are important to the Black community, the
right to raise your child in a safe environment is paramount because Black bodies,
Black people are over-policed by police departments and white citizen police
who believe that there is an a ffront imposed on them when, when Black
people are in so-called whites paces.
So these cornerstones help build the BRHC foundation.
Next slide, please. And so in addition to citing Black scholarship
outside of RHM and TPC, we also cite Black scholars. So Dr. Miriam
Williams with her research on regulatory writing, Dr. Aimee Roundtree who
has written about medical science writing, we have Dr. Cecilia Shelton and Dr.
Temptaous Mckoy who are also on this Task Force who have provided us with
a lens to see tech comm, Dr. Natasha Jones and her colleagues who have done a lot
of work on social justice in TPC. And I also want to shout out some up and coming
graduate students and their work, Veronica Joyner who is writing about
rhetorics of respect and Black maternal health in Jamal Jared Alexander,
who is specifically looking at folk medicine, mental health, and perinatal health,
which is important to our community obviously.
Next slide. And so before I leave you, I just want to
encourage you to think about a couple of core principles.
The full framework will include a— I'm going to share two with you here today.
One, acknowledging the history of medical abuse in a community within a
society. So you cannot say that you are working to eradicate disparities without
acknowledging the history. For example, if we look at the Black community and
the medical testing that has gone on in our community. If we look at the idea
that Black, Black people are able to sustain pain better than white people, you
have to go back in history to understand that that is a remnant of chattel slavery.
But here we are in 2020 and medical students are still, still have that misbelief
that Black, Black people can withstand high levels of pain which affects the
amount of pain medication they are given. And so number two, acknowledging the power
dynamic that affects consent between a patient and his or her healthcare
provider. Again, the issue of consent. If we go back in history and look
at the so-called father of modern day gynecology, J. Marion Sims conducted numerous
experiments on enslaved Black women. Thomas Jefferson tested his smallpox
vaccine on enslaved people. Henrietta Lacks. There, there's a
history of a lack of consent in the Black community when they deal with the medical
establishment. So I leave you with this question. As a scholar
activists, are you engaging in community driven activism or community
led activism as it pertains to rectify health disparities?
And my colleague Cana Uluak made me think critically about the difference
between community driven versus community led activism, and we can have
that discussion further. So if you have any questions, please put them
in the chat. I'm going to pass it o ff to Dr. Shelton.
Thank you.
Cecilia Shelton: Good afternoon. Thank you everybody for being here.
I'm gonna spend my time talking about Black activists as technical
communicators. So as technical and professional communication
scholars and practitioners, we're concerned with action. Our disciplinary
questions position us to ask how we communicate in ways that facilitate action.
How do we communicate to solve problems, to make decisions, to make
expert knowledge accessible? One of the disciplinary questions that Black
technical and professional communication asks is how do we get free?
How we compose our worlds, political systems, cultural organizations
our lives and even our bodies to achieve liberation and eliminate anti-Black violence?
The Black activist tradition is full of unnamed technical communicators asking
and answering that disciplinary question. Some of them are listed here on the
slide. You might recognize Victor Hugo Green, the person who created the, the
Greenbook, Bruce Boynton, who actually passed just last week. You might have
seen him in the news, but he inspired the Freedom Rides. And the Freedom
Rides were essentially user testing of the Supreme Court case that he won, that
meant that bus stations can no longer be racially segregated. The Black
Panthers, their ten-point party, and you see the more contemporary
representation of the Black Lives Matter movement, the hands up pose.
So with my time, next slide, please. With my time I'm going to talk about what
it means for Black activism to be a kind of technical communication that
we have not yet acknowledged in our discipline. And what it would mean for
us to see Black people as technical communicators themselves and as users or audiences
for technical communication.
The #BlackLivesMatter social movement, is a contemporary iteration of a long
legacy of activism in the Black rhetorical tradition. Popular attention to the
movement was renewed this summer in the wake of another string of state
sanctioned Black death, featuring hashtag names. Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna
Taylor George Floyd, among others. Black Lives Matter protests of summer 2020
drew more diverse crowds in a much more favorable posture, even if performative
from organizations and institutions. Everyone from our academic institutions
to Adidas, to Pop-Tarts was tweeting and releasing about Black Lives
Matter. Journalists and pundits would have you believe that this outcome should
be attributed to what some are calling The Great Awokening of white liberals
whose greater awareness of racial injustice makes them more politically engaged
and brings them into the streets, culminating perhaps with the multiracial protests
we saw over the summer. But I'm here to correct that record and point
out that the first iteration of the Black Lives Matter activism, not only
prompting that awareness, but also shows up over and over again to hold power
to account and to do the hard rhetorical and technical communication labor
of documenting, counter narrating, organizing, and holding accountable people
in power. And that's what moved our cultural awareness forward on anti Blackness
and white supremacy. In 2006, Elizabeth Britt argues that technical
communication is how institutions and organizations define themselves and do
their cultural work. Tech comm provides the infrastructure for these system
to operate and reproduce themselves. So if that's true, then shouldn't
we pay attention to the infrastructures for systems and strategies
of resistance so that we can understand who is building them and how they're
building them? And shouldn't we pay attention to how these infrastructures
get replicated and taken up in other justice movements?
So in this slide, I want to sort of talk a little bit about how I did work to analyze
Black activists as technical communicators. I saw Black activists as innovating on social
media genres, constructing them not as static, form based
responses to the recurring rhetorical situation of state sanctioned violence against
Black bodies, but instead, genres are being formed in assemblages of human and
non-human actors. And they are uniquely possible by way of the relationships
between those actors, not just the existence of the actors themselves.
So you have a person with access to a camera on their phone with also with
access to Twitter to upload pictures and videos that circulate immediately. But
also that person has to have the social positioning to understand the cultural
dynamics that are happening to make that important to document.
Moreover, I found that as rhetors riff on the genre conventions of both tweets
and hashtags, they're deviations and innovations in the uptake of the genres are
ways for them to assert agency in a situation where their power in the broader
social, political, and economic systems are limited. This power's derived in large
part from the opportunity to counter mainstream narratives about Black lives
and bodies by drawing on the affordances of the new and digital media around
them. While social media platforms are not designed
for resistance, Black rhetors use their expertise in navigating
oppressive social structures to subvert the norms of these spaces and assert resistance
while remaining under the radar in ways that obscure them from the white
gaze for long enough to communicate and organize for justice. I see
the use of hashtags as instrumental in this effort because they serve as a kind
of digital hush harbor, where Black rhetors can engage in emancipatory politics
suffused with particular forms of agency and identity.
Next slide, please. So with that little bit of analysis and context,
I want to spend the last few minutes of my time talking about what else
is possible when we make these kind of interventions with Black technical
and professional communication. So in order to make these connections between
the Black activist rhetorical tradition and technical and professional
communication, I started with heuristic questions that we can all consider.
What if technical and professional communication is not meant to be neutral and
objective and subjectivity is actually valued over the myth of objectivity?
What if TPC doesn't rely on standard language practices or white supremacist
notions of professionalism to make meaning? And what would happen if TPC
considered expertise an ethos that isn't substantiated by credentials or
titles? My work extends these questions by taking
a Black feminist epistemological foundation and stance, that ultimately I evolve
into creating a methodology, a techné of marginality.
And I did this work in part because it was necessary for me to create what I
needed but didn't have in order to do the work that I just explained. So I'll
introduce it quickly and I'm writing about it now.
The tenets that evolved out of these heuristic questions and this Black feminist
grounding. A techné of marginality is a methodological
framework that brought its notions of work and workplace, expands the
field of vision for technical communicators solving twenty-first century
problems, and embraces cultural rhetorical practices as valuable ways of knowing
and doing technical communication work.
A techné of marginality characterizes the critical and marginal standpoint from
which historically marginalized groups experience the world, and then engage
rhetorically as a techné, a flexible, dynamic, powerful, strategic, transferable,
transformative tool that can be used to do tech comm work.
It offers a theoretical and methodological resources for technical communicators
to move beyond cultural awareness and even cultural competence toward the
integration of cultural analysis in the practice of technical communication.
What's important here is that Black tech comm is more than a collection of
topical inquiries into issues affecting Black people we're doing theoretical,
methodological and pedagogical work too. So that work like ours that has been
excluded in the past, can be centered and amplified moving forward. Thank you.
Natasha Jones: So, I'm going to talk a little bit about regulatory policy and legal
communication. Next slide, please?
Black folks understand that we live in a nation that operates under the myth of
law and order, including laws and policies that have at times posited if we were
even considered full persons under the law. Black folk have long-held formal
and informal, intricate, varied, and complicated experiences with laws and
policies. Take, for instance, Jay-Z's "99 Problems."
Play the clip, please? So I, pull over to the side of the road I
heard, "Son, do you know wh—"
So I, pull over to the side of the road I heard,
"Son, do you know why I'm stopping you for?" "Cause I'm young and I'm Black and my hat's
real low" Do I look like a mind reader, sir? I don't
know Am I under arrest or should I guess some more?
"Well you was doing fifty-five in a fifty-four" (uh huh)
"License and registration and step out of the car"
"Are you carrying a weapon on you, I know a lot of you are"
I ain't stepping out of shit, all my papers legit
"Well do you mind if I look around the car a little bit?"
Well my glove compartment is locked, so is the trunk in the back
And I know my rights so you goin' need a warrant for that
"Aren't you sharp as a tack? You some type of lawyer or something?"
"Somebody important or something?" Well, I ain't passed the bar, but I know a
little bit Enough that you won't illegally search my
shit You get the point.
Clearly, Black folks know that where laws and regulations can be used in the
service of retribution, punishment, and penalization, these laws will be overabundantly
deployed against the Black community to imprison, detain, and
disenfranchise. On the other hand, laws and policies that
can be used in the service of empowerment and agency will be withdrawn or
withheld from our communities or we'd be just the subject of redistricting
and rezoning. Next slide, please? Actually stay on that
slide, Dr. Mckoy. Black folks know that, in order to survive,
we cannot be under the assumption that we can ignore the role that laws play
in our lives. "Why did he run?" "Why didn't she just show ID?" "Why didn't they
just comply?" We know that complicity and abiding by laws
has little impact on the Black experience of state sanctioned violence and
executions. Black folks are three times more likely to be killed by law enforcement
than white folks, even though they are less likely to be armed. Black folks'
experiences with laws have often been a point of survival.
Our experiences ground our expertise. In The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin talks
about "the Negro experience in the white world" and he says, "In any case, white
people, who profited by theft every hour that they lived, had no moral ground
on which to stand. They had judges, they had juries, they had shotguns,
the law and order, in a word, power." Contextualized, our expertise has often been
deployed in subversive ways and in order to help our community survive and
navigate through spaces, places, and situations that ignore us, marginalize
us, disenfranchise us and seek to eliminate us all together.
This is the Black experience in a nation of law and order.
We see examples of this in the latest election. Disenfranchisement of Black folk
is as American as apple pie and our very electoral systems are— of our great
democracy are forged in anti-Blackness. We cannot honestly discuss freedoms
without grappling with how Black folks are a part of how we as a nation,
understand the operation of this democracy. Take, for instance, Stacey Abrams,
and how she navigated and resisted in order to make discriminatory laws work
for Black communities in Georgia. Black folks understand that resistance requires
knowledge and expertise.
Sometimes expertise is overlooked simply because it resides in our homes and
in our communities. But Black folks understand that even the boundaries of our
communities, the very lines where we draw our neighborhoods to begin and
end, are a result of applied laws in disproportionate ways.
Redlining, a means of separating Black folks from access to wealth has
manifested the map of segregation across our country. On the surface, this
seems to indicate that Black folks are passively impacted by the application of
racist laws. However, we resist this because we understand that it is beyond the
laws that keep us collectively in community with one another. They're also more
blatant examples like Jim Crow Laws. And even as we protest, we recognize the
work of the myth of law and order. This summer, Black organizers worked to educate
protesters on the dos and don'ts of protests, organized bail funds for
jailed protesters and made visible the extrajudicial tactics that law enforcement
were applying against those protesters, even as "respectable" folks cried
out, "This is just pointless rioting and looting," Black folk were quick to remind
the masses of Baldwin's words. Those who "profited by theft, have no moral
ground on which to stand." Bottom-line, Black folks have always expertly
engaged policy, laws, and regulatory communication as a means for
survival and resistance, often out of the necessity in order to subvert oppressive
practices of the State. And even as I provide these examples, I know
some in the audience will say, "But that's not TPC."
The truth of the matter is, tech comm has always located expertise in practice
and application. Fundamentally, this is how we have historically engaged.
Those types of, "but that's not it" pushbacks come because of the devaluation
of Black expertise. And to be quite frank, they are anti-Black at the core.
Yes, this IS TPC. But for those of you who want more scholarly
or academic examples, take the work of Dr. Miriam Williams, who's been writing
about policy in tech comm for nearly two decades. In Black Codes: Removing
the Veil from Regulatory Writing, William states that "historically marginalized
groups, including African- Americans, are resistant to the traditional
style of regulatory writing, not because they can't read regulations or hire attorneys
to interpret the texts, but because laws written represent a veil that for so
many years acted as a rhetorical accomplice to America's color line."
She draws on W.E.B. DuBois' metaphor of the racial color line, and
connects DuBois' work to laws that examined regulations and laws of the color
line of his time. DuBois is then drawn in as a skilled writer and an engaged
technical communicator working to place Black folks at the center of his
examinations. What DuBois understood and what Miriam Williams later identifies
is disenfranchisement by the "intentional breakdown in communication and
government." DuBois' data visualizations were recently
published in a collection, and his infographics draw from the data from government
documents and the census. Thank you for the next slide.
DuBois should also be heralded an expert and visual and information design
because in his inforgraphics he revealed connections between laws, regulations,
policies, and Black life during his time. The editors of the collection note that DuBois'
"cross-fertilization of visual art and social science mark an important transitional
moment in the history of the disciplines while offering alternative visions
of how social scientific data might be made more accessible to the populations
and people for whom the data is collected."
And what does that sound like? Technical communication. As we assert: technical communication would
not exist without Black folks. Our knowledge, our expertise is legit, is valuable
and is fundamental to understanding our field. Thank you.
Constance Haywood: Thank you, Natasha. So I'm going to pick up pick up right where
she left off. And today I'll be talking a little bit around
Black research and ethics, mainly how we come to it and what TC can learn from it.
Next slide, please. So I want to read this quote by Godwin Agboka
that says, "Intercultural professional communication research needs
to develop a coherent body of new methodologies with their corresponding methods
that are cognizant of local logics, rhetorics, histories, philosophies,
and politics. By doing [this], our research approaches will answer the call of
social justice, which hinges on reflexivity, liberation, and empowerment."
So with some of the ways that racism and anti-Blackness is coded into and
within technology, and some of the ways that it impacts the ways that Black
folks receive health care, and in some ways that it's at the root of Black folks
being systematically targeted and killed by the hands of the state, we can also
locate racism and anti-Blackness in the academy, particularly in the ways that
intellectual communities have historically thought about, understood, and went
about their research practices. I don't have to go into the full history of
the ways that Black people have been harmed by and through research,
and I won't, because that kind of historical recollection would take forever.
But I can confidently say that most of us are probably familiar with the Tuskegee
syphilis experiment, just as we are aware of the gruesome history of
reproductive health experimentation in this country that Black enslaved women
endured. And somehow, somewhere, somebody okayed that work, and was
okay with it. And it was and still is completely horrific.
What we may not all be familiar with though, is how pervasive harmful research
practices in the academy are and can be, regardless of whether that harm
impacts Black folks' physical bodies and health as previous studies, as the
previous studies mentioned did or other parts of our selves that make up our
entire being. All of that to say Black folks both inside
and outside, a, excuse me. Black folks both inside and outside of academic
spaces have always had to think critically about what it means to protect
ourselves in a world that tends to view us curiously, objectively, and profitably
in this, often overlooking and sometimes downright disregarding our rights,
experiences, emotions, and all of the other things that make up our socially,
culturally, politically complex selves. And so when it comes to research practices
in technical communication and rhet/comp even more generally,
we're not absolved from replicating harm and it's our responsibility
to critically think about the things that we do, and put into motion in our scholarship
and work. And doing some early thinking and talking
around the Black digital methods and methodologies section of the statement that
we put together, I recall an early conversation between Ja'La and I, where we
talked a bit about what Black TPC is, and because of the work that we both do,
her with entrepreneurs and me with digital research ethics, we found ourselves
in the middle of a conversation about how Black TPC and Black anything really
is and always already rooted in Black experience and Black knowing. It's approaching
a thing and thinking based on what I know, see, feel, hear, interpret,
in what ways does this thing serve or not serve me and based on what? On
all those things and so on, how do I get this thing to serve me, to protect
me, to include me, to value me? To embrace my experiences, recognize them as
valid, as integral and frankly as important.
And so leaning more towards the Black digital research experience,
though we acknowledge that research experiences in TC are not solely digital, it
was important to begin thinking a little about the ways in which Black scholars
have generally used our understandings and cultural knowledges to navigate
research situations and cultivate research experiences, particularly those
concerning Black people's spaces and communities. We started to talk, we
started to discuss work that felt strategic in redressing harmful research
histories. And moving towards the centering of identities and experiences from
Black folks, seeing as though all of this deeply reflects and impacts how we
value and protect our communities, as well as how we understand, develop,
inscribe, and share our own methodologies, research methods, guidelines,
understandings of ethics, and various other communicative processes.
Next, oh? Oh, you can go back one I think. Okay, so actually next slide, I'm
sorry. So how does Black TC help us to think about
research? As we mentioned in the statement itself, Black
research methods and methodologies tend to center Black experience
as a way of understanding technology, community, ownership, and ethics
through a cultural lens, and using Black understanding knowledge and experience
to think through research in TC, we can better situate our research purposes
and understand the potential impacts, thus allowing us to create research
practices that are effective as they are empowering and social justice oriented.
It's important to remember that data is always already shaped by and through
people and that Black research methodologies must continue to stress that data
is never really separate from Black experience or identity.
It's important to say here too, though before I highlight folks' work that the
research methods included in the NCTE list include practices and
considerations from Black folks across fields of study. This should not be
unfamiliar to any of you at this point as you've seen cross and interdisciplinary
takes pretty much in all parts of this conversation and presentation so far. The
thing to take away here though, is that because of our very existence,
experiences, and orientations to the world around us, Black folks do TC work
innately and across the significant number of places and spaces.
[0:58:03] And for me, when I think about research methodologies, methods,
understandings of ethics, and all that, I find it all to be technical because it's
telling me, showing me and allowing me to do a thing, but I can't fully know how
to do the thing or understand a thing if certain perspectives are left out. So,
instead of continuing histories of research where things like relationship,
community, transparency, reciprocity are lacking, Black TC recognizes that our
skepticisms with research, regardless of whether we're part of the research
community or the participant community, is valid based on our histories.
And because of what we know to be evident, we have say in how, and what we
want to do when it comes to conducting research and when it comes to being
research. Because if you didn't know, Black research practices work to restore
agency and power in places where it tends to lack. So people and populations
that have not always had the ability and luxury to make decisions about their
presence, their bodies, their representations, and much more in research.
And on becoming and being a Black woman and Black feminist
researcher myself, I've said and written before that for me because I'm
researching and working within Black digital communities, my alignment to the
values of these communities meet the first and foremost concern about the
important work already taking place in them, and the well-being of the
community members. It means I'm very much aware of those histories, those
struggles, and those oppressions. And in building my practices, they should
directly correlate to my responsibilities in collaborating ways that aim to avoid
harm and work towards liberation in whatever forms that may take. That most of
our work lives and thinking about how our practices are directly tied to the
ethical obligations we hold and leveraging our power and position is to support
the folks that we desire to collaborate with. Next slide.
So, who might we cite and refer to to help us think about and through these
things? Just so we can get an idea of what this actually looks like. I don't have
any questions, but I've chosen to share a couple of quotes from brilliant Black
scholars inside and outside of the field that I feel can provide folks in TC with a
way to both think about and move forward with this kind of work.
Agboka, as also quoted in the beginning of the presentation, said that
technical communication researchers need to actively and progressively change
a few habits. For example, we need to more progressively question our own
assumptions, make participants active collaborators in research projects by
positioning them not as subject-objects, but as equal participants. Employ
reflexive research methods, be critical of our own approaches, and question our
insider positions, even if we claim to be native to the research site.
And in sociology, while doing some super important work in developing mixed
methods that better encapsulate Black women's identities and experiences,
Nicole Marie Brown writes on her particular work that the honoring of Black
women's experiences as legitimate through the use of auto ethnography is a
reflective response that exposes the agency the algorithm and counterbalances
its autonomy with that of a Black woman's narrative. For social scientists, our
methods, are the procedures we employ to gain insight into social life in society.
We choose methods based on what they allow us to do and understand. But
methods also create. They can create legitimacy, disruption, and liberation.
And as you see on this particular slide, I have photos of both Agboka
and Brown as well as scholars, Catherine Knight Steele, Andre Brock, and our
own, Natasha Jones. And so in closing, when it comes to technical
communication and beyond, Black folks are very clearly doin the work
of centering people, centering identities, centering experiences, as a way
to think more about how these things continuously impact the ways that we do the
do, essentially. And in terms of research, all of these things make room for
us to understand and develop our own means and routines of work, our research
procedures, and our senses of ethics, all of which continuously shape the
ways we see data, collect data, and understand identity as deeply implicated within
it. Thank you.
Temptaous Mckoy: Okay, I guess it's me now, I'm not really good at hittin next and talking
at the same time so don't y'all judge me, um, as this happens, please.
So I'm going to wrap us up by discussing Black Technical, Professional
Communication as community. See, told ya, I'm not good at clickin and
stuff. So Black TPC is exemplary of the need to amplify
the voices, lived experiences and ways of knowing for Black individuals
in and out of technical professional communication. As you all have heard so far,
my award-winning dissertation covers a theory that I've thought of, amplification
rhetorics, which centers the way of knowing, understanding lived experiences
and languages as used in Black communities. And I've used that theory
to look at it from the lens of technical and professional communication.
As the panel, we were all working together to try to identify what was the best
way to kind of conclude and bring things together. We realized that not only
was the resource guide, but the panel was an example of my theory amplification
rhetorics in practice. So I'll run through the tenets real fast.
So the first tenet would be your ways of knowing and understanding. So each of
us have our own very distinct way of movin through the world and our
understanding of life. Even though we have different age demographics, we're
also from different regions. We—some of us are parents, some of us are single,
some of us are we're just doing different things in our lives. So it has an impact
on the way that we move through our day to day. Our way of learning.
I myself, Dr. Cecilia Shelton, Dr Kimberly Harper are all HBCU graduates here on
the panel. So that has definitely impacted the way that we come to understand
technical and professional communication is to and to support what Dr. um,
excuse me, or about to be doctor, but a support what Constance Haywood has
said, this builds on how you move through your understanding of technical and
professional communication. Our experience as HBCU graduates, I from the
illustrious Elizabeth City State University, has impacted the way that I look at
technical and professional communication as missing other Black practitioners.
So what does it mean for those practitioners to be there?
And then finally, we have the usage of Black language and rhetoric. So
I'm from the South if you can't tell, so you may hear me use a little bit more y'all
and ya'll, and souls, and those up in there, and then it comes out in a different
way in the way we produce our technical and professional communication
documents. So one way that I define technical and professional
communication is communication that is derived from movin a
community or a group of people to action.
So notice how I didn't say a group of academics, I didn't say a specific group or
type of people. My grandmother is a Black technical professional communicator
because guess who I had to call to remember how to make stuffing this
Thanksgiving? Me, okay. So that was one way that Black TPC can, could be
communicated through different communities. So it's not just about what we're
doing here in the academy, but what are you doing with your families? Again,
we've seen the tweets, errbody had to learn how to cook on Thursday, all of a
sudden. So whomever you had to call is a technical and professional
communicator cuz they had to let you know how to move to action, right? So,
that's just one of those things that I just want to bring to the forefront.
So as we look at it as communities, the picture that you see here, I
want to shout out Dr. Michelle Eble who's in that second picture here of all of us
from ATTW, I think that was maybe 2019. I'm gonna go with 2019, 2018, don't
make me lie to y'all. As you can see in that image, all of those all of us there
were all from East Carolina University. So you have myself, Alisha, Cecilia,
Kimberly Harper, and Jamal Jared. All from East Carolina, all doin Black
technical and professional communication. And that's one way that we have our
community, and we're connected in practice. Then we have Ja'La, with the
picture of Dr. Adam Banks, Cecilia, and I again. So you notice once more, we're
all connected in community and practice Black technical professional
communication is inherently about community. Okay, so instead of giving, you know, some
of these additional reading sources here, I want to give you guys some questions
that I want you to really sit here and ponder on, okay.
My first question would be, does your theoretical framework block or
create barriers for members of Black or other historically marginalized
communities? Now, one thing that we always talk about is white lady feminism.
That's just one example that comes to mind for a lot of people when we think of
theoretical frameworks that may create barriers or block other people out. So I
want you all to to consider, Does your theoretical framework that you're creating
or building on, does it create barriers? The next one, do non-Black individuals or
non-people of color develop theories that have community development, without suppression,
at the center, right? So as you guys are doing all of your reading
and your citing, I want you to really consider who does this theoretical framework
benefit? As you listen to every panelists here speak, even though they were
speaking specifically to Black individuals and Black communities, whatever
those calls for changes are, would benefit everyone. Having consent as a medical
practice will benefit everyone, is not just Black women that would have that
benefit there. It's not just Black women that will be like, you know what? I'm
in pain a little bit. Everyone is in pain, right? So what's helpful for us to consider,
that how are your theoretical frameworks that you're citing and you're pulling
on, do they benefit everyone else around you or just the communities that
they're speaking to? Black TPC benefits everyone, hence meaning
once more, you would not have technical and professional communication
without Black people. Next, will the work that you as a technical
communication practitioner lead to the amplification of others or only benefit
communities that you are already centered and privilege? So once again, that
just echoes the same thing I've already said. Who is centered and who is privileged
in the theoretical frameworks that you were using?
I myself, I am starting to learn more about disability studies. This is something
that I personally, I did not know well, because I'm privileged enough to have
certain elements that I didn't know that I was missing. So for me, I've had to
step my game up and learn how do I bring in these same rhetoric of things that
may not impact me personally. What does that mean?
So the example I give a lot of times, I used to go to a lot of presentations and
panels and I will step away the mic because I'll say I'm loud, y'all can hear me.
Y'all, y'all, I don't need that mic. But it wasn't until I started to realize like, wait
a minute, there may be someone in the back,
that may not be able to hear me. There may be someone that needs that captioning
of my speech and that wasn't something I ever considered until I started
to work with members of other communities. Right.
And then finally, is your question on how to implement Black TPC,
centered around only yourself and your needs, or that of your students and
fellow practitioners? So we remember how like back over the summer
right, everyone was droppin all these Black squares, right? Like, ohh~ And
then we still had like a presidential election that we didn't know who won, right?
Like we're just like what happened there. So what happened to all those Black
squares? Right. So apparently you only did that Black square because it was
beneficial for you. Did you actually do the work?
So as you ask questions regarding Black technical and professional
communication or before we even get to the Q and A portion, are the questions
that your answered are they really centered in you wanting to do better or is it
because you wanted to be heard. Do you want to just simply show yourself as
an ally or do you really plan to do the work before you ask that question, right?
Because again, we all can show Black boxes all day, but we all see that a lot of
that stuff was performative because if it wasn't we wouldn't have what done
happen election Tuesday. So that was my portion there.
As I bring you guys to a close here, I have some few words that the
panel, all of us, we all thought of that we thought would be very critical and
important to share with you guys. So dear Black graduate students and Black
TPC practitioners, is important that you understand that you are not alone. While
we understand right now, it can be difficult to identify other Black TPC practitioners
in the field, know that you are not by yourself.
We are right here with you and we are here to support you. Know that this
community of Black TPC practitioners, those here on this panel, as well as
others in the field, are here to support you and assist your growth. If there's a
type of project that you want to do and maybe a panelists here does not cover
that, reach out to one of us, and we can reach out to somebody else. We really
good at connectin folks, right? The journey is not easy but surely worth it.
I want to make sure that I acknowledge that there's a lot of emotional
labor that goes into doing this type of work because you're also doing reflective
work on yourself. You starting to realize how these practices can actually impact
the way that you yourself move throughout life.
Four, stand in who you are. When you're not feelin sure, understand
that many of us are email, tweet, text, DM away. We understand it can be
difficult and you're trying to draw your ideas, especially when you have some
students who are coming or are at programs that may not have Black TPC
people there in their department, and you got these ideas in your head and
you're trying to work through them. So we get how difficult that can be. But we
want to make sure that we're here to support, you.
Number five, your Blackness is every bit a part of your work you are currently
producing and will produce. Don't let anyone make you feel or think that this is
not something worth interrogating, implementing, and valuing. One of most
beautiful experiences I can say that I had at East Carolina was I had mentors
that were willing to work with me, grow with me, and learn with me, as I focused
on Black TPC at TRAP karaoke. Like it was a part of my Blackness. I love Gucci
Mane, so they was able to work with me in that sense there.
Number six, don't let em have you twisted. Now. Some of y'all probably know
what that word should be instead a twisted but we gon say don't let em have
you twisted at this moment. Stand in who you are, stand firm in what you do.
And number seven, technical and professional communication would
not and cannot exist without you. So what I'm going to briefly ask all of our
panelists, so we had masks created, my panelists that have masks, everyone's did
not get here, you know, due to the holidays and shipping. I'm going to ask that
you please place your mask on or hold it up. We all have masks that have been
created here. You have the— zoom in Ja'La, go 'head get your model on so we
can see it good. Yeah, y'all zoom in. Thank you.
So if you would like to have own your Black technical and professional
communication mask, you can do so. I will make the link available with the
instructions. Also, since we have graduate students here
that are on the panel and it is so, so, so important that we support our graduate
students, we're asking that you put your money where your pocket is. So we have
their Cash App information available if you would like to donate, especially
because we have Ja'La Wourman who is on the job market. So please
help her as she prepares to go on the job market. Cash App available is available
in the slides. So again, once I send out the slides y'all can get that as
well. And finally, this is how you can contact all
the members of the Black TPC Task Force.
We thank you all for your time and I wish to open the floor for moderators to
handle questions. Imma stop sharin my screen, is that okay? Okay.
Ja’La Wourman: I think someone said they couldn't see the mask, so I'm just going to
hold it up again because you were sharing your screen.
Temptaous Mckoy: My bad. Yeah. So if y'all don't mind hold up the mask again. So we have
the mask created again, holidays, things of that
nature. You can order your mask, they were created by the same woman who made
my For the TRAP dissertation shirts.
Natasha Jones, can you come up a little bit so we can show our this is my
neutral and objective technical communication shirt?
We have that shirt available as well that you— y'all, we have a business baby,
don't play with it. You can purchase that shirt as well. So we'll make sure that
information is available to you. But the masks were created by a Black woman
business owner, so please help support her as well.
So again, we'd like to open the floor to any questions.
Chloe Robertson: Just before we get into questions, I want to say we have Amilia Evans
in the chat saying, could you please drop the link again to the masks, sort of and
to everything that you've presented. Temptaous Mckoy: Let me do that right now,
yes ma'am. Chloe Robertson: Thank you so much.
Seeing as I am unmuted, I'll go ahead and say we have, we have two questions
that came in while you were speaking, which sort of speak to the same point.
So I will go ahead and say some of our attendees are curious in this difference
between the community-led versus the community-driven sort of aspects of
moving forward. Kimberly Harper: So that question came about
because I was working with I am working with the March of Dimes here where I live.
And I was, I was really pushing for community driven, community driven. And I
actually went on Twitter and saw a tweet that Cana Uluak put. And she said that
community-driven and community-led, they're two different things.
And I started thinking about that critically. And I realize that community-driven
you go in and you work with individuals, you find out what they need, and then
you continue to drive the machine. But for me, community led is you go in, you
find out what they need, you give them the tools, and then they drive that
machine. And so when I thought about it in regards
to Black maternal health, I said, wow, Black, Black granny midwives were the first,
were a really good example of community health workers who had, who took
these resources and worked in their communities to not only catch babies
as they say, but also to deal with other public health issues that they saw when
they were going out here in the deep, deep South and it was definitely impoverished.
So for me, it's not about community-driven anymore. It's about providing people
with tools to lead their own initiatives. So when the researchers leave, the
opportunity for moving forward doesn't go away with them because these
people are now trained to now drive that machine and make adjustments as
they see fit based on their own experiences. Chloe Robertson: Thank you so much for answering
that. Um, we did have— sorry, I'm on multiple
devices. We did actually have a question sort of in
terms of this. You know, how are we instilling things, who are we listening to,
you know who are we uplifting? We did have a question that came through before the
talk actually from um Dr. Jim Henry, who was asking sort of what sort of
materials do you provide or advocate for to support K-12 educators to sort of so
even if you don't do it now I suppose, what would you advocate for to set
them up to— What, sort of have this confidence and to work in the field of
sort of, technical, professional communication and really sort of work with
this Black praxis to quote directly once they're in college. And so that's that's
a question to anyone. Donnie Johnson Sackey: Natasha, were you gonna?
Natasha Jones: No, go ahead, go ahead. Donnie Johnson Sackey: Okay. So I mean, I
think that's a really good question. I think that and I'll just
sort of say this briefly and then sort of pass, pass the mic, so to speak.
I think that it might be important to work from local contexts. And that local
context might be the community at your end. Or it might actually be the
students themselves. I think one of the things that we might think about or
consider is that students are a lot more knowledgeable about things than we
give them credit for. Or they might have experience with things that they might
not necessarily realized sort of fit into the frame that you're talking about. And I
think I got to see that question a little bit earlier, I think it was more or less
focused on sort of materials around social justice connected to the Black
experience. I think it's important to actually work with students based upon what
they already know and to build upon that. Rather than sort of seeking resources
from outside the community. Natasha Jones: The other bit that I'll just
add on is that, start with the statement and the resources that we put there because um,
culling from those statements and then, adapting them for the K through 12 classroom
allows folks to see those connections, to see that there are folks like
them that are in college and teaching college and administering programs. So go
ahead and expose them to the work that we're doing within the academy and within
our communities. And be, let them kind of like what Donnie said, build
up those resources with you. So I think that'll be a good approach to that as well.
Temptaous Mckoy: Um, if y'all don't mind me building on as well, Natasha and Donnie,
one thing that I've— I been realizing as people decide to move through you
know with Black technical and professional communication, and use the
resource guide as Natasha has pointed out, you have to be uncomfortable with
not being the expert as well. And the actual student may be the expert here in
this space. And I know for some people that may be a little
uncomfortable there. But, um, if you're going to ask students to do Black technical
professional communication work, which is a lot of times centered around
their lived experience, you're going to have to be willing to amplify and center
their life experiences. Luana Shafer: So we do have some other questions
in the chat and I just wanted to pull one out that I thought was really interesting.
Dr. Heidi Lawrence asked a question for Dr. Shelton. The notion of techné
of marginality, if you could possibly give an example of how that techné
works, in the workplace or for practitioners or in the classroom for students
of technical communication. Cecilia Shelton: Sure, that's a good question.
So of course, the most ready example are the activists I was trying to talk about,
thinking about the sort of everyday Black people and the ways that the hashtags
that we saw mobilized, #IfTheyGunnedMeDown, they mobilize and organize
people into activism, right? These are everyday people juxtaposing two
images of themselves to make an argument about how Black people are represented
in the media when they're killed.
But if I could offer another sort of example outside the activists contexts. So to
think about how a techné marginality might, might be helpful for sort of seeing a
kind of expertise that otherwise would not be recognized. You may have seen
this in the news. I don't know. It obviously caught my attention. There was a— I
think it was over the summer. There was a Black doctor, like a neurosurgeon
of some kind. There was a woman who was having like brain surgery. And
to prepare for the brain surgery, she went to the hospital with her hair braided
up into like four braids, I think it was. And so, she has the surgery, she is recovering
maybe a day or two later. She's sort of paying attention to her hair
and she notices that her hair is now in six braids like different braids than when
she started and she was like I thought, I coulda sworn that my hair was this particular
way. So she, whatever, she figures that she misremembered,
she goes to her follow-up appointment and learns that
her doctor, a Black doctor, knowing where he was going to make his incisions with
her surgery, and knowing how particularly important her hair is a Black
woman, as a dad of Black daughters, and also knowing how to handle kinky Black
hair, re-parted and braided her hair so that the scars, when she was recovering,
would heal in her part, so it wouldn't mess up her hair.
This is not a skill, right, that he learned in medical school. It's not a skill that
would be necessarily valued as part of his technical expertise, but I would argue
that it is. He provided something for that woman that was an important part of
her medical experience. A part of her being seen and recognized as a valuable
and— person and her values being important, not just to her but to him. And it
mattered in his technical medical expertise. So what I'm arguing for is that we
can only see particular kinds of skills as valuable, as technical, as expert. You
don't think of Black daddies braiding hair as any kind of expertise, but it's
grounded in the lived experience that he had with his daughters knowing that it
was important, right? So my goal is to open up what we can see as
expert, as technical and start to articulate the kinds of competencies and expertise
that Black folks bring to their work, both in organizations and systems that
we would recognize and workplaces, as workplaces and outside of those
contexts as well. I hope that helps.
Chloe Robertson: Thank you for answering that, Dr. Shelton.
We do have a few questions sort of revolving, again around sort of focal topic
here in the Q&A section. And that's the idea of taking all of your wonderful work
on technical and professional communication as it's seen in the academy, and
how are we sort of working towards that going into communities as we speak
about them. So, sort of speaking about how this, we have
this bubble in academia where we talk to each other, how are we making sure
that those voices are being brought in and there's sort of a loop going between
as opposed to one filtering down into the other. And this is— none of these
questions are really asked to anyone so again, the floor is open.
Ja’La Wourman: I’ll speak to that. So and the work I've been doing with Black
entrepreneurs, this is the question I thought about over the years about how do
we make our research transferable but also applicable to industry practices
because if we're going to be teaching students who might want to go into different
industries and trade jobs. We want to make sure that we're giving them the language
and the skill sets that's actually being used on the job.
So as I am, you know, I conducted interviews with different Black women
entrepreneurs asking them questions about their own lived experiences, their
journey, I am thinking about ways, how can I make this work benefit, not only
scholarship in TPC, but also them? So I think about ways that I can help them
out and that is through also my own branding and marketing and promoting
their services, promoting their brands, you know, making sure as if I was in the
classroom, I will be talking about these women as well and also the, their
journey. But making sure that when I go back into these spaces, that's not
academic, I also am incorporating what are some of the trends that might be
beneficial to them, that they have not had access to.
Which is why it's very important when we're doing this work in TPC,
that we're working with community partners, we're working with the people that
are doing the work because they are educating us just as much as we are
educating them. So I see it as transferable, I see it as we need to work together,
I know that there's been a lot of community service learning partnerships. That
is great if you're having your students do that in the classroom. But the danger
with that, which we just need to be mindful is if you're going to be sending
students for a semester to go work at a business or a small non-profit, an intern
or an assistantship being mindful that to them, they see this as help being
brought in free of charge that is needed. So what is your plan as a technical communicator
and as a scholar to make sure that that business still can thrive when your
student leaves, that's at the end of the semester. So there's different ways that
we can help one another out, but we just have to be mindful of the follow-up.
And what is the longevity of this? And these are some of the things that I think
about as well. Temptaous Mckoy: Can I back, uh, come off
you, Ja'La? I'm thinking for myself, and this is like
a shameless plug, but my dissertation video chapter does this very work. For those
of you who have not seen it, I'll make sure I post the link as well. But it's
on TRAP karaoke. And it's discussing how technical and professional communication
take shape in that space. And anyone who watches the video, you can, you
can see clearly that it's not for an academic audience, right?
So I think the first step in that, and I see Ja'La was definitely getting to this is
understanding audience awareness, right? So we're asked the questions about, oh, well,
how do I take this outside of the academy? Well, I don't know when you go to
your church, your church ain't like my church. My church, they be hootin and hollerin
and maybe your church they sit down and saying the whole time, right.
So that changes and shifts the way that you take Black technical and professional
communication or any TPC into any space.
I believe that the main thing that's the center in this idea of stepping
outside of it is to ensure that you're amplifying another voice. Remember, you're
not giving anybody a mic. That, that's something I always tell people like people
already got a voice. The voices there is been, hey, you ain't given nobody nothin.
Your job is to amplify that voice. Your job is to speak to it, all the while making
sure you're careful to not send in yourself as a savior.
Because as I'm seeing some of the comments and the questions that come in,
we have to be careful. And I believe Cecilia— actually almost a lot of the
panelists spoke on this, you're— you don't want to risk looking at it from a
deficit model like oh, this Black tech comm thing, this is a backhanded thang
but I think a critical part of it that some people may not realize, I think
understanding and maneuvering through Black technical and professional
communication practices is something that is very esteemed that a lot of people
really cannot do or they don't know how to do. Because I can maneuver
between an academic space in the Black space, but other people can only
maneuver through one specific space. So instead of looking at a deficit model,
I think is really time that we take, we take a moment to reflect on the way
that communities of color, specifically Black communities, able to maneuver
through predominately white spaces and Black spaces effortlessly. And
how it's not a trip up, it's not a issue, and reconsider how do you see that move? Or
some people will— Well if we say codeswitching, how do you see codeswitching
or that rhetorical move as a deficit? Ask yourself, can you do it, cause
if you can't do it, then maybe the deficit is on of the end of the table instead
of looking at it the other way. So I think just as critical that you center
the community that you're trying to go out into and use Black TPC practices with,
especially with the question regarding the high school and things of that
nature. Some of them kids probably can two-step, y'all all see the TikTok dances
nowadays, I can't do none of those moves to save my life, but if you ask any
of those kids to do it, I betcha they could communicate out to you how to do it.
That's a form of technical and professional communication that is rooted
in Blackness. So it's time that we actually really accept and acknowledge and
amplify how these practices are taking place and shape.
Ja’La Wourman: And just yeah, just really quickly and then Donnie, I'm sorry, I just,
when you were speaking, I just thought about how what this panel addressed
was this question, because we are sharing what is typically not centered in
scholarship. And that is the move that you're gonna have
to do if you're thinking about how can I make this applicable to non-academic
spaces, where you're going to have to rethink what counts as knowledge, and the
feel when am I counting as TC, and what am I counting as researchable? What
am I counting as methods? What am I counting as theory?
I mean, you gonna have to take some time, this is not a, after this panel I got it
all together. It might take you a whole year to really rethink your pedagogical
practices and how you situate technical communication. And that's fine.
Like that is ok, that is what this work is supposed to challenge you to rethink
how you have understood the field, and if you have marginalized voices through
your own practices and research, this is that time, they said 2020, really taught
us about ourselves and had us reflect them, well, let 2020 and 2021 be the time
where you have rethought some of your practices, cause this is what it's all
about. Donnie Johnson Sackey: And I was going to
add to this really quickly. I think one of the things that we have to
fundamentally sort of reassess or rethink is this idea of bringing things to
the community, particularly with respect to our research or going into the community
with respect to our research. I think what we really should be doing is
rethinking the research model in terms of how does a research project begin, and
one of the things that I've had the fortunate opportunity to be a part of with
D-VERSE in Detroit is the fact that all of the research projects that we do weren't
necessarily ideas that we drum up as university researchers. These were ideas that,
that became research projects because community members were experiencing
problems, and they came to the university and they asked like, is there
a way that we can sort of figure out what this problem is and develop a solution
around it? So I think one of the things that we have
to get out of the habit of is this idea of like sort of translating to the community
or going into the community to share what we're doing, and to start thinking about
the community as being a part of the research process from the beginning, seeing
community members as researchers who have value, who have knowledge,
to contribute to the process as a whole.
Jennifer Sano-Franchini: I just want to thank all of the panelists.
There's so much enthusiasm in the chat for all of your work, and I think we have
so much that we'll be thinking about. I really appreciate how just like this is like
really ground shifting kinds of things you were saying in terms of we're having to
shift our entire epistemologies and how we think about questions that we have
and problems that we see within our field, so, thank you so much for the time
and for your words and your wisdom, and thank you for everyone who attended
and to the moderators as well. Ja’La Wourman: Thank you, all.
Natasha Jones: Thank y'all for having us. Temptaous Mckoy: Thank y'all!
Cecilia Shelton: Thank you! Temptaous Mckoy: Tweet us, ooh!
Donnie Johnson Sackey: Thank you. Temptaous Mckoy: Go 'head put your book up
there, put the mask back up if you got a mask. Got
my shirt. Buy a shirt. Get your mask. Buy Kim— Dr. Harper, show us your book
one more time for people to order your book. Drop the link. Get your stuff.
Plugging it all. Boom. I'm a drop all the links.
Thank y'all so much, Virginia Tech, we appreciate y'all, thank y'all.
Constance Haywood: Thank you.