Places are filled with stories, with histories that shape how people understand the nature of a place. Places are unique sets of trajectories – each with a story – coming into contact. However, just as much as places are defined by their histories, they are also shaped by the histories that are forgotten, or far too often, actively suppressed through dominant narratives. After all, dominant media of spatial, public memory – for example, plaques and public monuments – often reproduce dominant narratives of a place, narratives created by the powerful. This project examines how digital placemaking can be deployed through locative technologies to push back on dominant spatial narratives and make places more polyvocal in consequential ways. In particular, through a project at Clemson University, we examine how locative storytelling applications can help students intervene in traditional narratives of place to engage with social justice and alternative histories.

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This panel introduces and critically examines the concept of "digital placemaking" as practices that create emotional attachments to place through digital media use. As populations and the texts they produce become increasingly mobile, such practices are proliferating, and a striking array of applications and uses have emerged which exploit the affordances of mobile media to foster an ability to navigate, understand, connect to, and gain a sense of belonging and familiarity in place. The concept of digital placemaking is both a theoretical and applied response to the spatial fragmentation, banal physical environments, and community disintegration thought to have accompanied the speed and scale of globalization—the implications of which include suggestions that our collective sense of place has been disrupted, leaving people unsure of their belonging within conditions and boundaries that seem increasingly fluid. While it is imperative to attend to the shifting social, economic, and political conditions that give rise to such concerns, it is also necessary to recognize the many ways people actually use digital media to negotiate differential mobilities and become placemakers. Papers in this interdisciplinary panel consider digital placemaking through a range of perspectives investigating lived experiences of assorted communities with disparate social and economic power to demonstrate how digital media can facilitate social and geographic boundary crossing while encouraging new ways of placing ourselves—symbolically, virtually, or through co-located presence.

's edited collection Citizenship and Advocacy in Technical Communication: Scholarly and Pedagogical Perspectives is a valuable addition to social justice-concerned literatures in technical and professional communication (TPC). Contributions in the collection probe a considerable array of exigencies for TPC scholarship, classrooms, and community initiatives to advocate for social justice. While this innovative and boundary-pushing collection occasionally falls short of its bold ambitions, it comprises generative and constructive essays that should invigorate conversations within TPC concerning social justice through their novel approaches to the work of advocacy in the field. TPC scholars have a strong history of infusing their pedagogical, workplace, and community initiatives with social justice endeavors. In the past decade, scholars have elevated service learning into prime pedagogical importance in the classroom (Bourelle, 2014; Cook, 2014); initiated a global, transcultural perspective unseen before in TPC work (Agboka, 2012; Kankaanranta & Louhiala-Salminen, 2011); and introduced the challenges of digital citizenship into technical communication domains (Simmons & Zoetewey, 2012; Verzosa Hurley & Kimme Hea, 2014). But as Jon A. Leydens mentions in the book's Afterword, despite the prominent place that civic engagement and advocacy issues have played in the history of TPC scholarship, the field has lacked a "coherent body of research. .. that