This article explores how “flatten the curve” (FTC) visualizations have served as a rhetorical anchor for communicating the risk of viral spread during the COVID-19 pandemic. Beginning from the premise that risk visualizations have eclipsed their original role as supplemental to public risk messaging and now function as an organizer of discourse, the authors highlight three rhetorical tensions (epideictic–deliberative, global–local, conceptual metaphors–data representations) with the goal of considering how the field of technical and professional communication might more strongly support visual risk literacy in future crises.

This essay argues that the gendered body is not accounted for in the physical conditions of motorsport but instead through the discourse of the sport. Specifically, women’s bodies signify as different in three main ways: beyond vehicles (navigating the space filled with other bodies and their respective vehicles), with vehicles (coordinating with the technology of the vehicle), and inside vehicles (operating in the space of and interacting with the technology) but situated by their gender’s discursively constructed characteristics. For women drivers in motorsport, these locations of identity formation offer embodied experiences mediated through discursive constructions. This article examines these articulations of the female body in motorsport, focusing on the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Donna Haraway, and Iris Marion Young.

Recently, human and user-centered design methods have challenged older system-centered practices, enriching resources and providing better technological artifacts for end-users. This article argues that though design has become more user-centered, something is still lacking: more opportunities exist for articulating feedback already present in technology-culture networks. To encourage the recovery of this feedback, this article examines discourses surrounding transportation technology and the ChÇra, the variety of stakeholders who shape the progression of technology through use, negation, or re-appropriation. While this article is far from a programmatic or procedural document, it suggests opening design processes to a variety of cultural inputs beyond those marked as "users." It attempts to open a space for technical communicators in these multifaceted feedback loops, where ChÇral influences are articulated and rearticulated for more effective transportation design.

Several recent surveys report a gap between how men and women feel about autonomous vehicles. While such binaries may have limited usefulness, female respondents rank autonomous technology as less trustworthy and are less likely than men to report feeling safe in an autonomous car. This comment frames such results within the articles for this special section on autonomous vehicles, showing how reported gender divisions are resultant from discursive formations that frame user experience and individual performed experiences. These discursive-material dynamics generate persuasive configurations of power that thoughtful research and action in autonomous vehicle development could help mitigate. After summarizing survey diff erences, this comment off ers a brief commentary on how they might be addressed, focusing on material rhetoric and vehicle design.

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