Contemporary Research Methodologies in Technical Communication

Taking things seriously with visual research

“…Such theories see our everyday setups as formidable constituents in what and how we know, and who and what we are or will be. As Clay Spinuzzi, Christa Teston, and I recently described, sociocultural and associative theories have attended to work contexts and the role of nonhuman tools and technologies in technical and professional communication (McNely, Spinuzzi, & Teston, 2015). And as Nathaniel Rivers and I argued at SIGDOC 2014, new materialist approaches to communication design significantly broaden the scope of potential actors and effects involved in everyday work (McNely & Rivers, 2014).…”

Coordinating Distributed Memory

“…Finally, by observing Beatrice at work, we discovered that her process was both an embodied and a technologically mediated practice. A reorientation of embodiment in technical communication studies in engineering (Haas & Witte, 2001) and the posthumanist research on knowledge work as the new material turn in technical communication (Mara & Hawk, 2009; McNely, Spinuzzi, & Teston, 2015) have compelled us to consider the interplay between the body (and what it can do) and technology (and what it does). By definition, embodied actions are performed by the human body, take place in real time and in particular places, and “entail the usually skillful and often internalized manipulation of an individual’s body and of tools that have become second nature, virtual extensions of the human body” (Haas & Witte, 2001, p. 416).…”

Undergraduate Social Entrepreneurship Education and Communication Design

“…As McNely, Spinuzzi, and Teston argue, scholarship in the material turn has troubled how researchers should bound off and study objects and practices, given the potentially formidable roles such objects and material environs play in everyday work and in practical attunements of technical communicators to those environs. [3] Bringing new materialist ideas to writing prompts may benefit students in helping them to better articulate the relationship between humans, materials, objects, and processes in product development with a social entrepreneurial focus.…”