Workshop Leaders
Steven Fraiberg, Michigan State University
Huatong Sun, University of Washington Tacoma
Scholars within the field of rhetoric and technical and professional communication (TPC) have called for situating the field in wider social, cultural, political, and global contexts. Despite a growing body of scholarship in this area, less attention has been focused on ways these issues are bound up in 21st-century global innovation and start-up ecosystems. Such work is particularly critical given the centrality of the innovation economy and creativity in the reconfiguration of identities, literacies, rhetorics, and mobilities across interlocking scales. This workshop is intended to fill this gap through shared readings and design activities intended to help build theoretical and methodological frameworks for linking local practices in these areas to wider transitionally networked spheres of activity and social practice. This move dovetails with the critical and social justice turns in TPC with an attendant focus on issues of power, privilege, and positionality. Building on this analytic lens and locating it in areas within and beyond North American borders (with attention to the Global South), the workshop will focus on how global innovation and startup ecosystems are bound up in the transformation of social, cultural, and semiotic landscapes in local and globalizing contexts. Coupled with this multilayered framework, it will further pose questions around how to enact specific innovation and design practices on the ground. In this way, the workshop is grounded in a critical global design framework that engages with differences and situates innovation systems in relation to new arrangements of culture and power. Our ultimate goal is to start a conversation to explore issues of diversity & inclusivity concerning entrepreneurship, innovation, and design (and design thinking) with a decolonized, indigenous rhetoric of the Global South.
Note: This workshop has limited space for remote participation.
Huatong Sun is Associate Professor of Digital Media and Global Design at University of Washington Tacoma. She studies how to design and innovate for usable, meaningful, and empowering technology to bridge differences in a globalized world. OUP Book author of Global Social Media Design (2020, CCCC Advancement of Knowledge Award, CCCC Research Impact Award, Best Book in Technical or Scientific Communication) and Cross-Cultural Technology Design (2012, NCTE Best Book in Technical or Scientific Communication), she writes for pubic media including Fast Company and The Conversation. Her community-engaged teaching innovation with marginalized user communities made her 2022 Jay R. Gould Award Winner for Excellence in Teaching from the Society for Technical Communication and the Distinction in the Practice of Diversity and Inclusion Award Winner of the Association for Business Communication. Twitter handle: @huatongs
Steven Fraiberg is an Associate Professor at Michigan State University and studies global high-tech startups and entrepreneurial ecosystems in both Israeli and Palestinian societies. He recently edited a 2021 special issue on global entrepreneurship and innovation for the Journal of Business and Technical Communication, and his article “Unsettling Start-Up Ecosystems: Geographies, Mobilities, and Transnational Literacies in the Palestinian Statup-Ecosystem” won the CCCC Technical and Scientific Communication Award for the Best Article Reporting Qualitative or Quantitative Research in Technical or Scientific Communication.