Disrupting the Past to Disrupt the Future: An Antenarrative of
Technical Communication
Natasha N. Jones
a
, Kristen R. Moore
b
, and Rebecca Walton
c
a
University of Central Florida;
b
Texas Tech University;
c
Utah State University
ABSTRACT
This article presents an antenarrative of the field of technical and profes-
sional communication. Part methodology and part practice, an antenarra-
tive allows the work of the field to be reseen, forges new paths forward, and
emboldens the field’s objectives to unabashedly embrace social justice and
inclusivity as part of its core narrative. The authors present a heuristic that
can usefully extend the pursuit of inclusivity in technical and professional
communication.
KEYWORDS
History of technical
communication; inclusion;
methodology; social justice
Introduction
At the colocated CPTSC and SIGDOC conferences in 2014, panels at both conferences interrogated
15the role of social justice and ethics in technical communication. These panels represent a necessary
turn in the field of technical communication: moving from mere ethics, which often exist in an
individual’s character or behavior, to a social justice stance, which tends to be more collective and
action oriented. The panels reflected Rude’s(
2009) depiction of technical and professional commu-
nication (TPC) as “a field of study and practice that contributes not just to self-perpetuation and best
20practices in its own area but also to the good of society” (p. 201). But Rude noted that this approach
requires reflexivity to be done well. In noting the field’s nascent turn toward social justice, we reflect
on and celebrate the work that could be categorized within Rude’s(
2009) “social action” category of
TPC scholarship, though considerations of inclusion and diversity in technical communication
research and pedagogy remain sparse. Or so it may seem.
25Indeed, when we look beyond grand narratives and draw together work addressing “the good of
society” from a variety of perspectives, we see that scholars across the field have begun to do the
difficult work of carving out a space for scholarship that attends to social justice and improving the
diversity of our academic community. For example, the 2012 CPTSC keynote by Miriam F. Williams
(
2013), acknowledged the work of TPC scholars who explicitly mitigate marginalization:
30These scholars are taking the traditional description of technical communication as a field that advocates for
the user to a new and exciting level by focusing on historically marginalized groups and issues related to race,
class, gender, and sexuality because these identity factors are not mutually exclusive. (pp. 87–88)
The work of TPC scholars to address inclusion, social justice, and diversity tempers claims of an
“apolitical and acultural” area of study and presents a “counterargument” to these criticisms
35(Williams, 2013, p. 88).
Although TPC scholars have long been exploring issues of inclusion, the collective contribution of
this work has gone largely unnoticed, (over)shadowed by the dominant narrative that technical
communication is most concerned with objective, apolitical, acultural practices, theories, and
pedagogies. The official narrative of our field indicates that TPC is about practical problem solving:
CONTACT Natasha N. Jones Natasha.Jones@ucf.ed Department of Writing and Rhetoric, University of Central Florida,
1114 Rock Harbor Avenue, Orlando, FL 32828.
Q1
© 2016 Association of Teachers of Technical Writing
TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10572252.2016.1224655
40a pragmatic identity that values effectiveness. But this is not the whole story. The narrative should be
reframed to make visible competing (i.e., a collection of nondominant) narratives about the work
our field can and should do. What is needed, we argue, is an antenarrative. Part methodology and
part practice, an antenarrative allows the work of the field to be reseen, forges new paths forward,
and emboldens the field’s objectives to unabashedly embrace social justice and inclusivity as part of
45its core (rather than marginal or optional) narrative. We argue that the field needs a more focused
study of the ways inclusivity has emerged in the field and the strategies/approaches that can usefully
extend the pursuit of inclusivity. As such, several research questions motivate this study:
(1) What common threads emerge under the broad umbrella of inclusivity?
(2) How might these threads, when drawn together, help us move forward in pursuit of
50inclusion as a central tenet of TPC?
(3) If we accept that inclusivity is an integral part of our field’s history, how can or should we
proceed?
We answer these questions through an antenarrative of the field’s history: a disruptive “before”
story that seeks to destabilize and unravel aspects of the tightly woven dominant narrative about who
we are as a field, what we do, where our work occurs, and what we value. David Boje (
2001)
55introduced the term antenarrative to describe “fragmented, non-linear, incoherent, collective,
unplotted, and improper storytelling” (p. 1). In contrast to narratives, which Boje (2011)
Q3 conceived
as characterized by “stability and order and univocality” (p. 5), antenarratives are poly-vocal,
dynamic, and fragmented—yet highly interconnected. They link the static dominant narrative of
the past with the dynamic “lived story” of the present to enable reflective (past oriented) and
60prospective (future oriented) sense making (Boje, 2008, pp. 6, 13). It is in this sense making where
much of antenarratives’ value lies because antenarratives are vital to the working out of actionable
knowledge (Boje, Rosile, & Gardner,
2004, p. 1). They can enable change:
These fragile antenarratives, like the butterfly, are sometimes able to change the future, to set changes and
transformations in motion that have impact on the big picture. More accurately, antenarratives seem to bring
65about a future that would not otherwise be. (Boje, 2008, pp. 13–14)
Antenarratives open up a space that invites reinterpretation of the past so as to suggest—and
enable—different possibilities for the future.
The antenarrative presented in this article looks to the future by examining the past. We assert
that specific, pragmatic actions are necessary to create effective change going forward. To that end,
70in addition to reflecting on work that has been done and pointing to future opportunities for more
inclusive TPC work, we also present a framework for developing a more inclusive focus in TPC
research. This framework addresses inclusion by interrogating how social and ideological identity
markers (like race, gender, sexuality, and ableness) are coconstructed and shaped by what we call the
3Ps: positionality, privilege, and power. These 3Ps function as macrolevel concepts that can affect
75social capital and agency. In regard to TPC, an awareness of how the 3Ps are articulated and
inscribed in our work is a necessary step toward increasing the inclusivity of our research and
practice.
In the spirit of full disclosure, we write this article because it is the article we need when we write
about our own inclusive work. When Jones
Q20 writes about the Innocence Project, or Moore
Q21
writes
80about public engagement in public planning projects, or Walton writes
Q22
about field research in the
Global South, each needs a foundational piece to point to that commits to the field a view of
technical communication and its inclusive efforts. The struggle to justify our work as TPC scholar-
ship derails our arguments, causes unnecessary throat clearing, and is just plain frustrating. We see
scholars across the field who are committed to broadening opportunities for citizens, users, scholars,
85students, and participants. But the dominant narratives of efficiency, technological expertise, and
innovative infrastructure too often dominate the field and research projects where inclusion sits at
2
N. N. JONES ET AL.
the heart of the project. To be clear: an antenarrative is NOT a literature review that synthesizes a
cohesive corpus of work. Antenarrative points to disjointed portions of a story that is still struggling
to be told. Boje (
2001) noted that “rather than reified plots, there are fragments of stories, bits and
90pieces told here and there, to varying audiences, so that no one knows a whole story . . . And pockets
of some agreement come undone” (p. 5). We assert not just that these stories of inclusivity and social
justice need to be told, but that telling them in the same place, with multiple voices renews the
otherwise silenced stories and invites others to join it.
In this article, we first interrogate the dominant narrative that weaves an orderly, completed
95tapestry of the field and then present a collection of nondominant stories, an antenarrative: threads
with the power to unravel aspects of the field’s tidy tapestry. Third, we articulate a vision for
inclusive technical communication and suggest reasons why inclusive approaches to technical
communication ought to be adopted. Finally, we present a heuristic for addressing inclusion in
TPC research using the 3Ps.
100
Interrogating the dominant narrative
The field’s historical, dominant narrative can be seen in early descriptions of successful TPC, such as
effectiveness as a sole criterion for “good” technical writing—one of two major conclusions of a
1940s survey of technical writers in industry (Connors,
1982). This survey informed the most
popular technical writing textbook of the 1950s—thus perpetuating a pragmatic identity that has
105persisted to today: see, for example, Johnson-Eilola and Selber’s(2013) description of their recent
edited collection as helping readers “to think about technical communication as a problem-solving
activity” (p. 3). Like other excellent and influential collections in our field (e.g., Zachry & Thralls,
2007), the scope of this collection is bounded by the dominant narrative: for example, privileging
pragmatic topics such as usability and information design with an eye to workplace problem solving.
110We, too, prefer our problems solved, but we do not believe the narrative of our field (our history, our
purpose, our identity) can be—nor should it be—so neatly encompassed by a coherently pragmatic
identity. This is one of the overarching benefits of an antenarrative approach: Antenarrative operates
in conjunction with—that is, in conversation with but often in tension with—the already accepted
and more cohesive dominant narrative.
115Not all scholars in the field adopt or embrace this coherent pragmatic identity. Indeed, the
antenarrative we present in this article rests upon widely accepted movements in the field, namely,
humanism and the sociocultural turn, in which focus shifted from problem solving and efficiency to
human impact. Advocating for the relevance of humanism to technical communication, Miller (1979)
introduced the importance of seeing language beyond the limited frames of instrumental discourse.
120Her early work reinfused science with rhetoric and challenged the field to broaden its understanding of
what technical communication can and should do. And others followed suit (Herndl,
1993;Katz,1992;
Sullivan,
1990). Although the primary practices and sites of technical communication remained
entrenched in science, engineering, and technology studies, the field broadened its perspectives on
the ways language and discourse press upon these practices (see Slack, Miller, & Doak,
1993). As social
125constructivist approaches to discourse became central to the field of technical communication, ques-
tions of power, authorship, and ethics, among others, also emerged (for example, Barton & Barton,
1993;Blyler,1995; Johnson-Eilola, 1996;Ornatowski,1992;Scott,1995). Scholarship from the socio-
cultural turn drew attention to our field’s complicity in oppression (Scott, Longo, & Wills,
2006,p.1)
by identifying and analyzing field-relevant examples of marginalization (Palmeri,
2006; Salvo, 2001)
130and cultural imperialism (Hunsinger, 2006).
These movements are necessary preconditions for the antenarrative threads we present in the
disruptive history that follows: exposing the need for and the history of a more inclusive technical
communication that we might be better positioned to pursue inclusivity as a central goal. By
inclusive, we refer to efforts to forward a mo re expansive vision of TPC, one that intentionally
135seeks marginalized perspect ives, privileges these perspectives, and promotes them through action.
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In short, the only stories that are heard are the stories that are ( re)told. Thus, we e ngage an
antenarrative methodology, which unravels and reweaves threads of our field’s(his)storytoopen
up new possibilities for the future stories we tell and enact. The following section reviews
important, but not always visible, stories that progress an ideal of a more inclusive technical
140communication.
Threads of TPC: An unravelling and reweaving
This antenarrative traces threads of TPC history, foregrounding movements, voices, and disciplinary efforts
that enable scholars to build a more inclusive technical communication. Rather than present a new origin
story, a history, or an ordered overview of the inclusive threads, we offer fragments (think of threads of a
145larger tapestry) that together offer a way forward that reenvisions the field. These threads include scholarly
work that typically functions at the margins: scholarship in feminism, sexuality, and gender studies; user
advocacy; community-based research; intercultural and international studies; disability studies; and race
and ethnicity studies. Historically, these threads have been addressed individually, each area of scholarship
struggling to make evident its benefits for the field of technical communication, and some threads enjoy
150more acceptance and integration into the broader field than others. Rather than build an argument about
the marginalization of particular areas, we instead weave a tapestry that draws these threads together,
identifying their shared (though fragmentary) interest in expanding the scope of the field and thereby
shifting its focus. This section functions to assemble and re-present existing threads not as a static or
comprehensive narrative, but as a collective that forwards inclusivity and advocacy and disrupts the
155dominant narrative we overviewed in the previous section.
Feminism and gender studies
The first antenarrative thread represents some of the earliest moves to increase inclusivity in TPC by
exploring gender and feminism. During the 1990s, the field experienced a surge in scholarly work
addressing gender. This surge emerged mostly in the form of special issues in the Journal of Business
160and Technical Communication (on the cultural turn in 1991), IEEE Transactions on Professional
Communication (on gendered assumptions of rationality in 1992), and Technical Communication
Quarterly (on social understanding of gender in 1994 and recovered histories of women in technical
communication in 1997). Throughout the decade, scholars (primarily female scholars) argued for a
correction of history to eliminate the exclusion of women and women’s work (Durack,
1997; Kynell,
165Tebeaux, & Allen, 1997) and an awareness of how gender colors our assumptions about rationality,
knowledge making, and research (Smith & Thompson,
2002;Thompson,2004). Scholars invested in
feminist theory and methodology highlight its promise for i nforming and improving the field (Bosley,
1994;
Gurak & Bayer,
2004;Koerber,2000;Lay,1991;Sauer,1993). LaDuc and Goldrick-Jones (1994), for
example, summarized a key contribution of feminist work: “looking through the lens of gender allows the
170writer-scholar-teacher to see how a number of communication practices can be oppressive” (p. 247).
These special issues are indicative of (1) the fact that a number of scholars across the field were
introducing new ways to include women and issues of gender into the field of TPC and also (2) the
ways in which this effort was somewhat quarantined from mainstream discussions. Indeed, we see
gender and feminism as an important antenarrative thread in part because it seems to repeatedly
175emerge only to be covered over again without having its due impact on the overall pattern of the
tapestry (i.e., the field). Indeed, in their attempt to catalog women/gender/sex in the fields’ five
journals, Thompson and Smith (
2006) reported only 21 articles published between 1994 (the height
of the special issue surge) and 2004, and significant gaps remain. Since the turn of the century, for
example, TPC scholars have offered gender, explicitly, limited attention (with some notable excep-
180tions such as Brasseur, 2005; Lippincott, 2003; Zdenek, 2007). An additional concern is the limited
feminist lens that largely furthers the White feminist cause, with little attention to the role of women
of color and their experiences in the TPC field (Jones, 2016b; Moore,
Q23 forthcoming).
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N. N. JONES ET AL.
This dearth of feminist and gender scholarship points to the need for an antenarrative that makes visible
the work that has been done and continues to be done. Further, an antenarrative perspective affords
185researchers the opportunity to “put the fragments together,” acknowledging the gaps in continuity and
content in feminist and gendered approaches to TPC research (Boje,
2001,p.9).Forinstance,Koerber
sustains a feminist agenda throughout her work both in technology (
2000)andinmedicalrhetoric(2013).
Extending the work of Durack (
1997), Koerber (2013) located new sites of technical communication in
breastfeeding discourse. Britt (
2001), too, extended the purview of feminist technical communication by
190introducing reproductive technologies (and public policy) as a part of the field. Frost (2015)troubledthe
fragmented treatment of gender and feminism within the field, arguing for an “apparent feminism” that
highlights feminisms’ and feminists’ potential for making political change. In addition, there is burgeoning
interest in and efforts to mentor women for positions of leadership (e.g., the introduction of the Women in
Tech Comm organization in
2013, publications such as Sullivan & Moore, 2013,andthewidespread
195leadershipofwomeninthefield’s professional organizations such as ATTW and SIGDOC).
Race and ethnicity
Recently, TPC scholarship has worked toward inclusion through research that addresses racial and
ethnic diversity, but focused and sustained critical engagement has been sparse and fragmented.
Antenarrative is useful for drawing attention to the contributions and significance of this sparse,
200fragmented collection of work. The antenarrative approach of microstoria analysis specifically
focuses on the narratives of minorities (racial and ethnic minorities, as well as gendered minorities,
minority groups of socioeconomic class, and other types of minorities), providing a space for
scholars to call out ruptures in the dominant narrative (Boje,
2001, p. 45). This antenarrative points
to these disruptions. Relatively few TPC scholars explicitly mention race and ethnicity, instead using
205the more general term diversity. This diversity focus has, at times, served as an insufficient stand-in
for addressing race and ethnicity. For instance, the 1994 special issue of Journal of Business and
Technical Communication on communication, the workplace, and “diversity of all kinds, including
race, gender, and ethnicity” (Limaye,
1994, p. 277) primarily included articles that only tangentially
acknowledged issues of race and instead relied heavily on broader discussions of diversity.
210A notable exception is Kossek and Zonia’s(1994) piece, which examined how racial and ethnic
groups (including Asians, Hispanics, and African Americans) responded to employer attempts to
increase diversity in the workplace. This interest in racial diversity has been taken up more recently
by Savage and Mattson (2011), who moved the conversation forward by establishing “a baseline of
information about diversity in technical communication programs” (p. 42). These scholars called for
215further devotion to the field’s diversification in terms of under-represented populations and the
cultural perspectives that inform our scholarship and pedagogy.
The move toward naming race and ethnicity (rather than diversity in general) as viable and important in
technical communication research and pedagogy has been slow goi ng, with only a few examples to draw on
(see Banks,
2006;Blackmon,2004; Haas, 2012;Williams,2010). A recent special issue of the Journal of
220Business and Technical Communication (JBTC) extended the discussion with an exclusive focus on race and
ethnicity. Special issue editors Williams and Pimentel (
2012)acknowledgedthatpartofthedifficultyof
garnering and sustaining scholarly conversations about race and ethnicity is that “many, inside and outside
of our field, believe that race is not a relevant concept in our society or field. Some argue that we live in a
nonracist society, and thus the need toacknowledgecolornolongerexists” (p. 272). The scholars in the
225JBTC special issue (Evia & Patriarca, 2012;Haas,2012;Pimentel&Balzhiser,2012) and their subsequent
edited collection (Williams & Pimentel,
2012) help pave the way for other scholars to “move beyond issues
of diversity in the practice of technical communication” (p. 1). Doing so acknowledges the fact that the
field’s relative silence about how race and ethnicity affects the invention, practice, delivery, and engagement
of technical communication can and has negatively affected groups that are marginalized and disenfran-
230chised
(p. 1). And, as we will later argue, the acknowledgment of harm done is vital for transitioning from
mere diversity to true inclusivity.
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