CFP: Designing with Generative AI in TPC

Posted on by

Dear TPC scholars and teachers,

I trust we are upholding another as we navigate the multiple crises facing the field, our students, and the environment. Amid these challenges, I am hopeful about the impact and reach of our collective scholarship. To that end, my colleague Jialei Jiang and I would like to share a publication opportunity here.

Designing with Generative AI in Technical and Professional Communication: Critical Perspectives, Practices, and Pedagogies

Generative AI (GenAI) has impacted how technical and professional communicators develop information, build content, and design user experiences. This edited collection brings together scholars and teachers in technical and professional communication (TPC) to examine how GenAI is changing design practices across classrooms, workplaces, and community contexts. Emerging TPC scholarship has examined AI-assisted composing, human–AI collaboration, multimodal production, user experience, content development, and locally situated approaches to AI ethics (Duin & Pedersen, 2023; Hart-Davidson et al., 2025; Jiang, 2024; Tham et al., 2022; Vetter et al., 2024). Yet, less attention has been given to design as an overarching framework for understanding how communicators shape AI-mediated artifacts, experiences, workflows, and ethics.

Building on TPC scholarship in participatory and human-centered design, design thinking, and justice-oriented communication (Rose, 2016; Salvo, 2001; Spinuzzi, 2005; Tham, 2021; Walton et al., 2019), the collection defines design as the rhetorical, iterative, and sociotechnical work of configuring relationships among designers, users, interfaces, environments, and technologies. From this perspective, designing with GenAI involves deciding when and how AI enters a communication process, negotiating human and computational agency, evaluating generated materials for diverse users, and shaping the ethical conditions of AI-mediated communication. We invite theoretical, empirical, methodological, professional, and pedagogical chapters that examine how technical and professional communicators design with, through, and around GenAI. Chapters may address text-generating systems as well as AI-supported image, audio, video, interface, chatbot, agent, and multimodal design.

Interested to contribute? Submit a 350-500 word chapter proposal, not including references, to Jialei Jiang (j.jiang) and Jason Tham (jason.tham) by October 1st, 2026. Please use the email subject line “Designing with GenAI Chapter Proposal.” We welcome any inquiries or questions about this edited collection.

Proposals should include:

  • A provisional chapter title;
  • Each author’s name, position, affiliation, and email address.
  • The section of the collection to which the chapter best contributes;
  • The chapter’s central argument or research question;
  • The theoretical framework or relevant literature;
  • The research method, case, context, course, and/or professional/workplace practice examined;
  • The chapter’s findings and contribution to the collection; and
  • References.

Please refer to the attached full call for proposals for details, including the publication timeline.

Thank you,
Jason

Jason Tham, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Technical Communication & Rhetoric
Assistant Chair, Department of English, Texas Tech University

Editor-in-Chief, Computers and Composition
Cluster Lead, Digital Life Institute

CFP Designing with Generative AI in Technical and Professional Communication.pdf