Citizen technical communicators: A Transnational social justice analysis of grassroots genres during the novel coronavirus outbreak

Abstract

During the outbreak of COVID-19 in China and the Wuhan lockdown, Chinese-speaking volunteers from across the world offered a genre ecology to provide accurate technical information and useful resources to inform people; to emphasize the lived experiences of those impacted by the virus; and to coordinate online and offline actions to bring resources and support to those impacted by the pandemic directly and indirectly, using social media platforms. Facing barriers of systemic oppression caused by government information control, transnational political tensions, and racial and ethnic discriminations, these civic technical communicators acted as forces of resistance to enact social justice-oriented technical communication. In this article, we propose a social justice-oriented, critically contextualized methodology to analyze such transcultural communications and perform a rhetorical genre analysis of example genres. We argue that these citizen communicators were transparent about their positionality and aware of their privileges when facilitating crisis communication and disaster relief in order to empower those marginalized in the dominant discourse and oppressed by official relief measures. We offer implications on critical practices for researchers, practitioners, and teachers of technical communication for engaging with social justice in transcultural crisis communication.