Deny, Defend, Depose

Structuring Permission for Bureaucratic Indifference, Slow (Civic) Violence, and the Institutional Betrayal of DEI

Authors

Keywords:

diversity, equity, inclusion, DEI, permission structure

Abstract

Bullet-casings inscribed with “deny,” “defend,” and “depose” (DDD) were found at the scene of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson’s assassination. This symbolic act of technical communication shocked corporate America and catalyzed discourse about the harm caused by for-profit healthcare insurance. DDD is a commonplace in the insurance industry that rhetorically functions as a permission structure for denying claims, defending denials, and deposing claimants to delay care until they give up or die. As a case study of the DDD permission structure, we analyze political technical communication artifacts from the second Trump administration’s attack on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) infrastructure.

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Author Biographies

Ryan Cheek, Missouri University of Science & Technology

Dr. Ryan Cheek is an Assistant Professor of Technical Communication at Missouri University of Science & Technology, where his research explores the interplay of political communication technologies, apocalyptic rhetoric, and crisis messaging in shaping public discourse, informing policy, and influencing our collective future. Bridging scholarly inquiry with applied practice, he investigates how language, media, and design interact to persuade public audiences and motivate action during elections, emergencies, and everyday encounters. His work has been published in respected journals such as Technical Communication Quarterly, Communication Design Quarterly, IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, and the Journal of Technical Writing and Communication.

Isidore Dorpenyo, University of Minnesota–Twin Cities

Dr. Isidore K. Dorpenyo is an Associate Professor in the Writing Studies Department at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities. His research focuses on election technologies, science and technology, international/intercultural technical communication, social justice, and localization. He is the author of the book, User-localization Strategies in the Face of Technological Breakdown: Biometric in Ghana’s Elections. Dr. Dorpenyo has won multiple awards in TPC, including, the Ken Rainey Award for Distinguished Research and the 2023 CCCC Technical and Scientific Communication Award for Best Article on Pedagogy or Curriculum in Technical and Scientific Communication. He has co-guest edited three special journal issues. He has published in Technical Communication Quarterly, the Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Technical Communication, IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, Programmatic Perspectives, Journal of Technical Communication and Social Justice, and the Journal of Technical Writing and Communication.

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Published

2025-09-14

How to Cite

Cheek, R., & Dorpenyo, I. (2025). Deny, Defend, Depose: Structuring Permission for Bureaucratic Indifference, Slow (Civic) Violence, and the Institutional Betrayal of DEI. Technical Communication and Social Justice, 3(2), 9–31. Retrieved from https://techcommsocialjustice.org/index.php/tcsj/article/view/82

Issue

Vol. 3 No. 2 (2025): Fall Issue: Special Issue on Unjust “Permission Structures” in/as Technical Communication

Section

Articles

License

Copyright (c) 2025 Ryan Cheek, Isidore Dorpenyo

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.