Technical Communication and Social Justice

Introduction to Special Issue on Unjust “Permission Structures” in/as Technical Communication

R.J. Lambert — 2025-09-14

The term “permission structure” has been popularized to describe a specific rhetorical strategy whereby communicators use the audience's existing beliefs and values to persuade them to change their original positions and/or take actions they otherwise would not. Even in its popular uses, permission structuring may be usefully understood as a form of technical communication by which audiences are strategically persuaded to accept or reject complex policy, scientific, and legal topics. However, scholars must resist popular jargon outpacing and superseding the use of technical concepts and critical discourse. Taken together, the seven articles in this special issue potentiate multiple critical, pedagogical, and practical applications for permission structuring as a technical communication strategy. We therefore intend for this introduction and each of the following articles to inspire further research into, and articulation of, the many possible uses and understandings of permission structures within the field of technical communication.

Dedication

R.J. Lambert — 2025-09-14

Deny, Defend, Depose

Ryan Cheek — 2025-09-14

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.

Permission From the Future

Sara DiCaglio — 2025-09-14

In February 2024, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos created through the process of in-vitro fertilization (IVF) were definitionally children and entitled to the protections of the Wrongful Death Act. This article examines communication surrounding this case to consider the role of future-based permission structures in a post-Dobbs era. Understanding these speculative futures as permission structures allows us to understand how imagined futures that are taken as fact become the basis of these ethical and legal judgments, as well as how tropes of science fiction and speculative technologies can operate as unjust permission structures that impact present lives.

Anti-DEI Legislation as an Unjust Permission Structure:

Nick Sanders — 2025-09-14

This article argues that state-level anti-DEI legislation, through technical communication texts, deliberately grants permission for white people to enact racial violence. Complicating common understandings of permission structuring, I argue that unjust permission structures target and amplify white racial anxieties, creating a decision-making environment that authorizes social and political harm. Through critical discourse analysis of 16 anti-DEI bills introduced in state legislatures in 2023, I identified three key rhetorical strategies used to yoke white publics toward harmful rhetorical action: White Rage, which challenges pro-Black advancement; White Narcissism, which centers control and surveillance to uphold white power; and Deflecting Histories, which seeks to erase or revise narratives of white supremacist violence. My analysis reveals that these rhetorical tactics achieve two interconnected outcomes: first, they stoke white racial anxiety and fragility; second, they alter the legislative choice architecture in ways that embolden behaviors harmful to DEI advocates, communities of color, and others targeted by the broader “war on woke.”

Culture(d) Wars: Reciprocal Permission Structures in Cultured Meat Bans

S. Marek Muller — 2025-09-14

“Cultured meat” is an emerging food biotechnology with potential to disrupt the animal agriculture industry by creating animal protein from only an animal’s cells. Despite the industry’s relative infancy, myriad legislation has been introduced to stifle or ban the technology outright. Using bans in Florida and Alabama as case studies, we identify two mutually reinforcing discourse communities that allow the political right to enact anti-cultured legislation despite such laws explicitly stifling free enterprise, a core conservative value. We dub these top-down (legislative) and bottom-up (social media) discourses reciprocal permission structures, in which rhetors of disparate social capital advance a populist conspiracism inherently suspicious of technical rhetoric for social change.

Donation Bag Programs as Multimodal Permission Structures

Sarah Riddick — 2025-09-14

This project explores how the emergent trend of buying donation bags in exchange for store credit creates a consumerist permission structure for people who are concerned about overconsumption’s environmental impacts. I analyze two forms of technical communication from a commercial donation bag program: the bags themselves and the websites that sell them. This analysis shows how these forms of communication establish a permission structure that appears to enlist audiences into a greenwashed consumerist cycle and presents unclear evidence of positive environmental impacts. I conclude by recommending digital and technical communication strategies for improving business websites’ credibility and audience engagement.

“What Do I Need to Say to Make You Trust Me?”

Elena Kalodner-Martin — 2025-09-14

The COVID-19 pandemic has transformed digital health communication, particularly on social media, where individuals increasingly engage in public negotiation over vaccination decisions. Drawing from a multi-year study of social media and interview data, this manuscript identifies how four dominant permission structures—vaccination as social responsibility, economic imperative, personal freedom, and method of institutional control—have both facilitated and constrained vaccination decision-making and communication practices. Based on these findings, this manuscript provides actionable strategies for tailoring public health messages to align with audience values, such as community care, economic recovery, or personal autonomy, while avoiding framings that may inadvertently exclude, alienate, or disenfranchise marginalized groups in matters of personal and public health.

Good Queer, Bad Queer

Courtney Fallon — 2025-09-14

Since October 7, 2023, familiar heroes and villains in the long, bloody story of Palestinian struggle have reemerged in Western media narratives. Even as recycled frames once again take shape, the queer/LGBTQ+ community as a distinctive political constituency is a new(er) character in the over 75-year relationship between the United States and Israel. In this essay, I argue that The New York Times, a prominent voice in this violent history, utilizes pinkwashing as a process of permission structuring to rhetorically call forth a Good Queer citizen-subjectivity that requires the juxtaposition and erasure of the Bad Queer citizen: the queer Palestinian.