Designing for Social Justice Community-Engaged Approaches in Technical and Professional Communication

Editors’ Introduction: Social Justice and Multimodal Design in Ethical Community Engagement

Jialei Jiang and Jason Tham

Part I Theories and Ethics in Designing for Social Justice

1. Community-Led Design: Building Frameworks for Equity and Justice
Aimée Knight

2. Deploying Design Justice in Environmental Injustice Settings
Lisa L. Phillips

3. Trust, Understand, Act: Using Visual Place-Based Research Methods to More Deeply Understand Community Perspectives
Erin Brock Carlson

4. Eating to Heal: Using Design Thinking to Reconceptualize a Community-Engaged Project for Health Justice
Sarah Moon

5. Designing Ethical Constraints to Enable Flourishing in an Online Community
Steve Holmes and Jared Colton

6. Incorporating Community Knowledge in Design: A Reflective Account of Designing Technology with Justice
Sweta Baniya, Katrina Powell, Yahoo Salem, Layla Scott, and Margaret Webb

Part II Community-Engaged Design Efforts in Action

7. Beyond “Maintaining Status”: A Call for Distributed Responsibility in the Professionalization of International Graduate Scholars
Felicita Arzu-Carmichael, Therese I. Pennell, and Josephine Walwema

8. What We Came Here For: Students Learning Local Civil Rights Rhetorics as Part of Kennesaw State University’s Primary Source Initiative, the #ATLStudentMovement Project
Serenity Hill, Ahlan Filstrup, and Jeanne Beatrix Law

9. “Nothing about Us without Us”: Post-Exertional Malaise (PEM) and the Challenge of Designing Activism for People with ME and Long Covid
Jennifer Nish

10. Resisting the Datafication of Injustice Through Collaborative Design and Translation in a Local Museum Exhibit
Laura Gonzales, Valentina Sierra-Niño, and Robin Lewy

11. Revitalizing Endangered Languages Through Community-Led Design: The Wikitongues Approach to Preserving Linguistic Diversity and Cultural Heritage
Tobechukwu Friday, Kristen Tcherneschoff, and Daniel Bögre Udell

12. Contemporary Chinese Grassroots Activism for Social Justice: The Chained Woman’s Case
Liping Yang and Xiaobo Wang

Part III Pedagogical Exemplars of Multimodal Design for Social Justice

13. A Kairotic Approach to Teaching Online Asynchronous Community-Engaged Technical Communication Courses
Antonio Byrd

14. Designing with Care: A Cultural Rhetorics Praxis of Care for Digital Storytelling Projects About Reproductive Justice
Danielle Marie Koepke

15. A Pedagogy of Ethical Engagement: Preparing Students for Technical Communication in Communities
Carrie Grant

16. Inviting Disability into the TPC Classroom Through Service Learning
Ellen Cecil-Lemkin

17. Pedagogical Approaches to Normalize Inclusive Design
Jamal-Jared Alexander, Dorcas A. Anabire, and Rebecca Walton

Editors’ Outro: Opportunities and Challenges of Multimodal Community Engagement for Social Justice

Jialei Jiang and Jason Tham

Appendix: Sample Course Syllabus

Biography

Jialei Jiang is a Teaching Assistant Professor of Composition in the Department of English at the University of Pittsburgh, USA.

Jason C. K. Tham is Associate Professor of Technical Communication and Rhetoric and Assistant Chair of the English Department at Texas Tech University, USA. His recent works include UX Writing (Routledge, 2023), Designing Technical and Professional Communication (Routledge, 2021), and Design Thinking in Technical Communication (Routledge, 2021).

“Designing for Social Justice is an insightful edited collection that highlights the transformative power of designing projects in collaboration with community partners. Jiang and Tham have assembled an essential resource that invites readers to engage deeply with communities, to design with empathy and intention, and to create ethical work that resonates with the lived experiences of those it aims to serve.”

Nora Rivera, Chapman University, USA

 

“Continuing to push the field of Technical and Professional Communication, Designing for Social Justice advances the important work of imagining how social justice can be a central component of TPC work. Jiang and Tham have curated an excellent collection that is doing the important work of bridging our academic spaces to the communities we aim to connect with and serve.”

Victor Del Hierro, University of Florida, USA

 

“Designing for Social Justice foregrounds the vital role that communities must play when designing justice-oriented approaches to wicked problems. Whether seeking to expand their knowledge of theories and concepts encircling design and justice or searching for methodological or pedagogical practices they might adapt for research and learning in professional, public, educational, and design settings, audiences will find chapters that enrich their understanding of ethical, sustainable, reciprocal, and just community-engagement. That is, most importantly, Jiang and Tham have offered us a book that might steer our field toward more critical praxis with communities.”

Timothy Amidon, Colorado State University, USA