Strategies for Navigating Transnational Projects
Room 42 is where content leaders gather.
In this episode, Nancy Small and Bernadette Longo discuss their book, “Transnational Research in Technical Communication: Realities and Reflections,” a collection of stories about designing, conducting, analyzing, and delivering projects that cross national borders.
Airdate: November 10, 2021
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Long Description:
Dr. Nancy Small is an Assistant Professor of English and the Director of First Year Writing at the University of Wyoming. She joined UW as a tenure-track faculty in 2016, after 25 years on the teaching faculty at Texas A&M. The last six of those were spent at the branch campus in Qatar. Her work has been published in journals such as Peitho: Journal of the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric & Composition, the Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, and the Journal of Usability Studies as well as in scholarly books about transnational and intercultural issues such as The Routledge Handbook to Communication and Gender and Western Higher Education in Asia and the Middle East: Politics, Economics, and Pedagogy. Her monograph, Feminist Sensemaking through Storytelling: USAmerican Women in Qatar, is based on ethnographic research of the white expatriate community during her six years living and working in the Middle East. Her current projects include an article on reading handmade material artifacts as textual memoirs of their erased makers, and a book-length project on rhetoric, place making, and public memory in the USAmerican West. In support of this last project, she received a spring 2021 fellowship with the Wyoming Institute for Humanities Research.
Dr. Bernadette Longo is an Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities at New Jersey Institute of Technology. She is the author of Spurious Coin: A History of Science, Management, and Technical Writing (SUNY Press, 2000), Edmund Berkeley and the Social Responsibility of Computer Professionals (ACM Press, 2015), and Words and Power: Computers, Language, and U.S. Cold War Values (Springer Press, forthcoming 2021). She is the co-editor of Critical Power Tools: Technical Communication and Cultural Studies (SUNY Press, 2006) and The IEEE Guide to Writing in the Engineering and Technical Fields (IEEE Press, 2017). Dr. Longo has also written and presented numerous journal articles and conference papers. She currently enjoys life by a small lake in New Jersey.
When preparing work for delivery to stakeholders and/or for publication, editors, reviewers, and other readers generally want a sanitized version of the project in direct, IMRaD-driven terms that deny space for reflection, struggle, or even failure. Nancy Small and Bernadette Longo discuss their book, “Transnational Research in Technical Communication: Realities and Reflections,” a collection of stories from the trenches. They have witnessed first hand the legal, practical, and ethical challenges that emerge even during activities that seem relatively simple and straightforward. They will share a sampling of the stories of difficulties technical and professional communication (TPC) researchers and practitioners have faced, their strategies for navigating those challenges, and their reflections over how their projects changed or even failed. In this episode of Room 42, we’ll discuss the vast challenges of designing, conducting, analyzing, and delivering outcomes of projects that cross national borders.
Resources
Transnational Research in Technical Communication: Stories, Realities, and Reflections by Nancy Small and Bernadette Longo (2022) https://sunypress.edu/Books/T/Transna...
Nancy Small, Ph.D.
Website: https://www.nancysmall.org
Academia: https://wyoweb.academia.edu/NancyLive...
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?...
Her latest book: A Rhetoric of Becoming: USAmerican Women in Qatar (2022)
Bernadette Longo, Ph.D.
Faculty Page: https://people.njit.edu/faculty/blongo
Academia: https://njit.academia.edu/BernadetteL...
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?...
Her Books:
Words and Power: Computers, Language, and Cold War Values (2021)
Edmund Berkeley and the Social Responsibility of Computer Professionals (2015)
Spurious Coin: A History of Science, Management, and Technical Writing (2000)
The IEEE Guide to Writing in the Engineering and Technical Fields. Co-author. (2017)