Guest Editors' Introduction: New Technological Spaces

Start-Up Nation

“…In making this move, this research contributes to scholarship in technical and professional communication (Fraiberg, 2013; Pigg, 2014; Prior & Shipka, 2003; Read & Swarts, 2014; Slattery, 2005; Spinuzzi, 2003, 2008, 2015; Swarts, 2011; Swarts & Kim, 2007) on the complex ways that institutional spaces, media, and texts jointly configure (and get configured by) and coordinate activity in the context of everyday situated literate practices. Moreover, this area of scholarship increasingly attends to “all-edge adhocracies” (Spinuzzi, 2015, p. 15), or flexible, agile, and distributed workplace activities.…”

Positioning Programs in Professional and Technical Communication: Guest Editor's Introduction

“…(See also Swarts and Kim's [2009] wise essay on hybrid spaces and spatial fluidities).Imagine,forexample,theespeciallyinnovativeanswersthatwemightgenerate to the question that Rude (2009) has identified as central to the field: "How do texts (print, digital, multimedia; visual, verbal) and related communication practices mediate knowledge, values, and action in a variety of social and professional contexts?" (p. 176).…”

Coordinating Constant Invention: Social Media's Role in Distributed Work

“…With knowledge workers increasingly disconnected from desk and office spaces on the one hand, and with contract and freelance work on the rise on the other, professional communicators whose work is symbolic-analytic often face a dual burden: composing an immediate time and space to conduct their work and overcoming a long-term lack of stability related to future professional opportunities. This alternative positioning requires activities such as locating and constructing rhetorical spaces (virtual and physical) to support multiple writing tasks (see Spinuzzi, 2012;Swarts & Kim, 2007). However, it also requires what might be described as ''invention,'' when that term refers to a general sense of ''the creation of what is new in any discipline or endeavor'' (LeFevre, 1987, p. 2) and invokes what Grabill (2007) has described as a ''problem of knowledge'' related to creating discourse in the presence of multiple forms of symbolic action than we often realize.…”