Dear Colleagues:

The Journal of Technical Writing and Communication (JTWC) invites article proposals for an upcoming special issue that examines how technical communication contributes to past, current, and future understandings of what it means to be “secure.”

Proposals Due: October 15, 2024

Publication Date: October 2025 (tentative)

Guest Editor: Dr. Christopher J. Morris, Assistant Professor of Writing, York University

Contact Info: christopher.jh.morris

To read the full CFP, please continue scrolling or visit this Google Doc.

Special Issue Description

This special issue of JTWC explores how technical communicators engage methods, cultures, and discourses that rely upon threats to justify practices and policies. Such justifications—often used to mitigate, neutralize, or manage real and purported danger—are referred to as “security logics.” Today, security logics are leveraged to justify institutional and organizational actions related to immigration, public health, policing, (inter)national security, climate, reproductive rights, privacy and surveillance, election integrity, and emergency management. Often, while couched in a promise of safety, policies enacted in these areas contribute to the erosion of civil liberties, violations of human rights, and the perpetuation of racial and economic injustices. Meanwhile, acting as conduits for security logics are technical communicators and common technical communication genres like manuals, instructions, reports, data visualizations, proposals, translations, and UX/UI design. Indeed, securitization can be inherent in technical communication and the discipline’s defining values of safety and utility. This special issue seeks both to confront technical communication’s complicity in corporate, organizational, and state-sponsored security practices and to uncover how ethical technical communication destabilizes conventional security logics for more just outcomes.

Security Logics and Technical Communication

While security measures are generally understood as preparation for threats, security logics are rhetorics, discourses, and communication practices that construct or describe threats––and thereby empower organizations and institutions to act in managing said threats. Researchers, typically in critical security studies, tackle security logics using frameworks like rhetorical theory, actor-network theory, and ethnography to articulate how discursive and cultural justifications influence individual, group, and organizational behaviors (Anwar et al., 2020; Macías-Rojas, 2018; Sutler & Mutlu, 2013). Wrange (2022) has described security logics as “the interplay of discursive practices on the constructions of identity, security governance and the perception of threats” (p. 577). For Stępka (2022), security logics comprise “an intersubjective practice of meaning making that triggers a particular security-oriented mind-set and shapes the perception of both the nature of the problem and actions undertaken to deal with it” (p. 34). Technical communication externalizes both the perception of threats and the actions that address threats. After all, the words, visuals, and designs that technical communicators create carry rhetorical meanings as well as practical and technical applications.

Moreover, according to Berling et al. (2022), “Securitization theory was not set up to just describe a reality of security politics. Rather, the construction of the concept of securitization also reflected political and ethical considerations about the political performativity involved in any use (or non-definition) of security” (p. 7). Thus, technical communication scholarship can add to security studies and vice versa by considering performativity as not just political discourse, but also technical and communicative labor constitutive of “security” (and raising the question of security for whom). Notably, in this regard, Longo (2000) contends that documentation and operation standards in technical writing can contribute to workplace cultures of panopticism. Likewise, Scott (2003) illustrates how medical technology and rhetoric can constitute surveillance of marginalized groups; and, on the other hand, Ding (2009), for example, has addressed such concerns by considering how unauthorized risk communication amid the SARS epidemic reveals possibilities for more ethical technical communication.

Given the prominence of technical communication in maintaining securitization’s entangled infrastructures (as noted in the works of scholars like Longo and Scott for instance), several definitive questions arise for scholars and practitioners of technical communication:

· What are the technical communication genres, technologies, discourses, and workflows that contribute to security apparatuses, and to what effect?

· How do security logics in technical communication influence, stigmatize, or support particular audiences, communities, or spaces?

· In what ways do rights advocates and those affected by security logics leverage technical communication for their own personal and local benefit?

· How can technical communicators ethically engage technology, institutionalization, and data without passively succumbing to the perniciousness of security logics?

· How should we use technical communication to distinguish meaningfully between justified and unjustified security logics for securitization adherents as well as skeptics?

· How might security studies inform, clarify, or expand technical communication and vice versa?

Research in technical communication has largely engaged security logics only indirectly, by way of several discrete (though related) subareas, namely ethics, risk/crisis communication, surveillance studies, and tactical communication. Therefore, we have an opportunity to examine security logics on its own terms as principle and praxis. We might consider:

Ethics

The field of ethics in technical communication analyzes the extent to which writers and designers can affect outcomes, both good and bad. This consideration can be applied to security apparatuses that rely on documentation, technology, and rhetoric. Katz (1992) identified the “ethic of expediency” in his rhetorical analysis of Nazi technical documentation that was used in Germany’s bid to “secure” the Third Reich. Stanchevici (2013) later adopts Katz’s concerns about expediency, by showing how security service reports rhetorically classified Soviet citizens in ways that empowered Stalin’s regime. Similarly, Ridolfo & Hart-Davidson’s 2019 edited collection Rhet Ops: Rhetoric and Information Warfare establishes a critical imbrication between digital technology, applied rhetoric, and securitization in the post-9/11 U.S.

Risk/Crisis Communication

Organizations and communities use risk/crisis communication to convey information about threats. For best results, these communication processes rely on effective, ethical (though oftentimes challenging) methods. Scott (2003), for example, has shown how particularistic constructions of “risk” related to HIV deployed security logics that actually further imperiled communities-at-risk. Youngblood (2012) has examined how an “access-security tension” influenced local government agencies in how they shared public information about emergencies. More recently, Young (2020) has explored how user experience design and technical communication contributed to a “privacy crisis” for Zoom post-COVID, wherein the application’s security and users’ privacy had been compromised.

Surveillance Studies

Surveillance generally entails monitoring others to ensure security. Technical communicators participate in this monitoring, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not. Young (2023), in articulating the ever-expanding relationship between technical communication and surveillance, has noted that “Themes of cultural imperialism are particularly present in national security rhetoric.” In considering pedagogical implications, Pflugfelder & Reeves (2024) demonstrate how surveillance and security motivate pedagogical approaches to artificial intelligence.

Tactical Technical Communication

Tactical technical communication, a do-it-yourself approach practiced by non-state, non-institutional actors, offers a potential starting point from which to conceptualize technical communication beyond or against security logics. Randall (2022) has called for a tactical technical communication not based in utility, while Aguilar (2022) has recognized “indirect communication” practiced by marginalized groups as additionally “tactical.”

Practical Relevance

Security logics have wide-ranging applications, and technical communication’s role in those applications—be they digital technology, surveillance, privacy and data concerns, or otherwise—may continue to come under greater scrutiny. Thus, this special issue provides practitioners, researchers, and educators opportunities: to revisit codes of conduct and ethics; to develop heuristics and strategies for identifying effective and ineffective security practices; to draft and implement appropriate, humane risk/crisis communication campaigns; to think through ways to engage students and colleagues in discussions about the real-world impact of technical communication labor; and to generate other next steps for those invested in articulating and/or responding to security logics.

Specific Topics that May Be Covered

This call invites proposals for case studies and original research articles that explore a relationship between security logics and technical communication practices. Proposals by U.S. and international contributors from higher education, industry, and government are all welcome and encouraged. Submission topics may include but are not limited to:

· Risk/crisis communication

· Surveillance studies

· Usability/UX/UI

· Medical/health communication

· Tactical technical communication

· Documentation

· Border rhetorics

· Rhetorical legitimation

· Ethics

· Public writing

· Organizational communication

Submission Guidelines

Please email proposals (of no more than 400 words, not including citations and references) as a .doc file to Chris Morris (christopher.jh.morris), with the subject line “[Last Name] JTWC Proposal on Security Logics.”

All proposals should include:

· Author name(s), affiliation(s), and email address(es)

· A provisional, descriptive title for the proposed article

· A summary of the topic/focus of the proposed article

· An explanation of how the proposed topic/focus connects to the theme of the issue

· An overview of the structure/organization of the proposed article (i.e. how the author will address the topic within the context of the proposed article)

Questions about this special issue and prospective submissions should be directed to the guest editor, Chris Morris, at christopher.jh.morris.

Timeline

CFP published: August 15, 2024

Proposals due (400-word max): October 15, 2024

Authors notified by: November 15, 2024

Full manuscript drafts due: March 15, 2025

Reviews to authors: May 15, 2025

Revised manuscript due: July 15, 2025

Special issue published: October 2025

References

Aguilar, G. L. (2022). Framing undocumented migrants as tactical technical communicators: The tactical in humanitarian technical communication. 2022 IEEE International Professional Communication Conference (ProComm), 246–250. https://doi.org/10.1109/ProComm53155.2022.00051

Anwar, N. H., Sawas, A., & Mustafa, D. (2020). Without water, there is no life: Negotiating everyday risks and gendered insecurities in Karachi’s informal settlements. Urban Studies, 57(6), 1320–1337. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098019834160

Berling, T. V., Gad, U. P., Petersen, K. L., & Wæver, O. (2022). Translations of security: a framework for the study of unwanted futures (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003175247

Ding, H. (2009). Rhetorics of alternative media in an emerging epidemic: SARS, censorship, and extra-institutional risk communication. Technical Communication Quarterly, 18(4), 327–350. https://doi.org/10.1080/10572250903149548

Katz, S. B. (1992). The ethic of expediency: Classical rhetoric, technology, and the Holocaust. College English, 54(3), 255–275. https://doi.org/10.2307/378062

Longo, B. (2000). Giant brains controlling scientific knowledge: A history (in progress) of human/computer relationships. New Histories of Writing, Session 2. 2000 MMLA Convention. Kansas City, MO.

https://case.edu/affil/sce/Texts/Longo.html

Macías-Rojas, P. (2018). The prison and the border: An ethnography of shifting border security logics. Qualitative Sociology, 41(2), 221–242. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-018-9382-2

Pflugfelder, E. H., & Reeves, J. (2024). Surveillance work in (and) teaching technical writing with AI. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication. https://doi.org/10.1177/00472816241260028

Randall, T. S. (2022). Taking the tactical out of technical: A reassessment of tactical technical communication. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 52(1), 3-18. https://doi.org/10.1177/00472816211006341

Salter, M. B., & Mutlu, C. E. (2013). Research methods in critical security studies: An introduction (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203107119

Scott, J. B. (2003). Risky rhetoric: AIDS and the cultural practices of HIV testing. Southern Illinois University Press.

Stanchevici, D. (2013). The rhetorical construction of social classes in the reports of Stalin’s secret police. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 43(3), 261–288. https://doi.org/10.2190/TW.43.3.c

Stępka, M. (2022). Identifying security logics in the EU policy discourse: The migration crisis and the EU. Springer Nature.

Wrange, J. (2022). Entangled security logics: From the decision-makers’ discourses to the decision-takers’ interpretations of civil defence. European Security, 31(4), 576–596.

https://doi.org/10.1080/09662839.2021.2021889

Young, S. (2021). Zoombombing your toddler: User experience and the communication of zoom’s privacy crisis. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 35(1), 147-153. https://doi.org/10.1177/1050651920959201

Young, S. (2023). Working through surveillance and technical communication: Concepts and connections. (1st ed.). State University of New York Press.

Youngblood, S. A. (2012). Balancing the rhetorical tension between right to know and security in risk communication: Ambiguity and avoidance. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 26(1), 35–64. https://doi.org/10.1177/1050651911421123