Reimagining Activist Data: A Critique of the STOP AAPI HATE Reports through a Cultural Rhetorics Lens

by Dan Harrigan | Xchanges 16.1, Spring 2021

Imagining a Cultural Rhetorics-Informed Future for Technical Communication

Ultimately, this project sought to reveal, critique, and reimagine the exigent STOP AAPI HATE initiative and its data practices through the lens of cultural rhetorics. However, despite its myriad ambitions, it is also important to acknowledge that this project began with a single story, sparked to life by an embodied experience in an uncertain, historical time. In this past year of pandemic-related fear and physical social distancing, it is admittedly easy for us as technical communicators to retreat back into our data, away from our stakeholders’ real needs and situations. However, as demonstrated by this project, a cultural rhetorics-inspired approach to technical communication encourages communicators to be ever cognizant of their user communities and their own roles of power in evolving digital platforms. As evidenced in this paper, communicators can use digital technologies and presentation techniques to reimagine how we share and receive information with our target audiences in a reciprocal and respectful fashion. Moving forward, I have no doubt that knowledge of cultural rhetorics can encourage technical communicators to continually work with, and not for, their users.