ATTW Bulletin

Programs in technical and professional communication must continuously evaluate the academic propriety and administrative efficacy of their position within colleges and universities: is it better to be a separate department? or a separate division within a department? Is it better to be allies of English? allies of Communication? allies of Engineering? The history of programs in technical and professional communication has been filled with discussions of location, dislocation, and relocation.

Every technical communication program is circumscribed by its academic location—the way we perceive the discipline, the teaching and research we do, the priorities we establish, the projects we tackle, the associations we join. All of it is influenced—and quite possibly determined— by the location of the program and the colleagues we meet daily in the halls and offices of the buildings we occupy. The majority of programs, for example, are institutionalized in a “Department of English” and this defining condition encourages the privileging of textual studies (i.e., teaching and research likely to be appreciated by colleagues in literary fields).

Specifically, brief articles of 15-20 manuscript pages might explore the relationship of program location to:

the history of the field and the histories of individual academic institutions
the qualitative and quantitative research we do
the pedagogical practices and critical theories we adopt
the new technologies and communication activities we assimilate to the field
the job opportunities and employer expectations we try to satisfy
the ethical and civic obligations we espouse

Submission Procedures

E-mail proposals (1–2 pages maximum, attached as doc, pdf, or rtf file) outlining the article you wish to contribute to Sam Dragga sam.dragga@ttu.edu by September 1, 2008.

For proposals that are accepted, complete manuscripts will be due June 1, 2009. Publication is scheduled for summer 2010.

Please e-mail also if you have questions about potential articles or if you would like to serve as a reviewer for this special issue.