Undermining Risk and Technical Communication: Extractive Industry, Cascading Disaster, and the Global Climate Crisis (SUNY series, Studies in Technical Communication) - Hardcover

Amidon, Timothy R.; Sackey, Donnie Johnson; Pflugfelder, Ehren Helmut; Richards, Daniel P.

Hardcover

ISBN 13: 9798855807417

Publisher: State University of New York Press, 2026

Synopsis

Changes the conversation about risk by exposing the field's historical complicity with extractive industries and building new methodologies for future risk communication research.

Technical and professional communication has a problem with how the concept of risk has been considered alongside extractive technologies. Throughout its history, the practice, teaching, and research of technical and professional communication has been embedded within, complicit with, and indebted to these industries. These industries have also created massive global harm to people and ecosystems, both through accidents as well as the slow violence of pollution and climate change. In response, this book seeks to "undermine" how technical and professional communication works with risk by reconsidering implications that traverse a greater span of time and geography. It revises the field's risk methodology and encourages future researchers to navigate the scope and scale of their projects. Along with new theoretical framing, the text presents three detailed case studies illustrating how careful consideration of scope and scale can impact how technical and professional communication engages extraction and risk, showcasing to new and experienced technical communication researchers alike how risk communication is about to enter a new era.

About this title

About the Authors

Timothy R. Amidon is Associate Professor and Chair of Professional and Public Writing at the University of Rhode Island. He is editor in chief of Communication Design Quarterly.

Donnie Johnson Sackey is Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Trespassing Natures: Species Migration and the Right to Space.

Ehren Helmut Pflugfelder is Professor of Scientific, Technical and Professional Communication at Oregon State University. He is the author of Communicating Mobility and Technology: A Material Rhetoric for Persuasive Transportation and Geoengineering, Persuasion, and the Climate Crisis: A Geologic Rhetoric.

Daniel P. Richards is Professor of English at Old Dominion University. He is the editor of On Teacher Neutrality: Politics, Praxis, and Performativity and, with Kristen P. Moore, of Posthuman Praxis in Technical Communication.

Edition details

• Publisher: State University of New York Press
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 13: 9798855807417
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 290