Assistant Professor Chen Chen and Associate Professor and Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies Jared Colton each recently published articles in Volume 12, Issue 2 of Communication Design Quarterly.
Chen’s article, “The Post-digital Life of Transnational Activists: Develop a Tactical Technological Literacy,” theorizes tactical technological literacies in transnational activism contexts through analyzing the “White Paper/A4 Movement” protests in 2022 against Chinese government’s “Dynamic Zero-COVID” Policy. Chen says, “This project was close to home for me because as a member of the Chinese diaspora, I care about how digital technologies not only facilitate but also constrain and suppress global activism. I thus advocate for a more critical understanding of technology use and design.”
Jared co-authored his article with Danielle Feldman Karr, who earned her Master of Science degree in Technical and Professional Communication from USU. The article, “The Digital ‘Good Life’: The Limits of Applying Ethics of Care to a Company ‘Running with Scissors,’” was also co-authored with Steve Holmes and Josephine Walwema. Their article “considers the successes and challenges of applying an ethics of care informed by Graham’s Black feminist ethics in order to analyze how designers think about ‘the good life’ in persona redesign.” Jared says: “This article was really rewarding because it started years ago when Danielle Karr was a Master of Technical Communication student taking my ethics and technology course. That’s when she began to be interested in the ethics of care, particularly when applied to communication and writing in a workplace that is moving fast and where the bottom line is almost always the priority. Danielle eventually got her PhD at Texas Tech (I was on the committee), and we recognized that her dissertation research could be extended in interesting ways, which led to this co-authored article.”