Sandra’s Reviews > Technical Communication After the Social Justice Turn: Building Coalitions for Action > Status Update

“The difficult part about the work of recognition is that marginalizing already marginalized groups of people may not appear to you (or to others) as an act of oppression. But... By centering the experiences of multiply marginal individuals, we become better at recognizing how our daily, mundane practices contribute to the marginalizatiom, exploitation, and powerlessness of others.”

“There is no form of TPC that functions outside of the four domains of power; therefore, no practitioner or scholar on TPC should excuse themselves from engaging with oppression, injustice, and social justice in their work.”

“...[O]ur theory of power, positionally, and privilege implore technical communicators to consider their own individual positions within the matrix of domination, oppression, and injustice in addition to institutional, structural, and cultural power relations.”

“Embracing minority students wholly (their ways of making knowledge, their ways of communication, their activism) helps academic programs progress toward inclusion as a productive, disruptive difference; otherwise, programs risk tokenizing students, accepting them primarily or exclusively because they make the programs look good. This--diversity without inclusion--is oppressive and dangerous.”

“Technical communicators invested in social justice must begin to recognize the ways their work may be rooted in the oppressive practices of cultural imperialism and exploitation, to understand the violence that language can do, and to confront the ways our programs, practices, and organizations render particular social groups powerless and keep them at the margins.”