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2. Globalization amid the cornfields: teaching sustainable practices in the American Midwest
- Collection:
- Agricultural Communications Documentation Center (ACDC)
- Contributers:
- Salvo, Michael (author)
- Format:
- Online article
- Publication Date:
- 2010-05
- Published:
- USA: ERIC
- Location:
- Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: 7 Document Number: D10238
- Journal Title:
- The Writing Instructor
- Notes:
- 13 pages., The original website no longer has a copy of the article. Access is available through ERIC database. ERIC Number: EJ890607, Via online source., This article discusses three sites that disrupt accustomed expectations and roles for technical communication. These sites include an agricultural processing site that is requesting tax abatements in exchange for decreased emissions so that it can remain competitive in the global market. The second is also an agricultural manufacturing site that remains globally competitive by increasing efficiencies and expanding the range of products made at the site. Finally, the essay discusses a manufacturing facility that takes finished products-automobiles-and remanufactures them for a niche market of users. Each of these Midwestern sites is globally competitive and challenges expectations for high technology work. Taken together, they gesture toward new definitions of work, in new postindustrial context, and offer insight for defining technical communication in the postindustrial age. The remaining challenge, for scholars and teachers, is to articulate emerging literacy practices supporting postindustrial manufacturing, and to participate in the knowledge management that supports innovation. Here, each site takes something that would have previously been considered either finished product or waste and rearticulates it as an ingredient in a new product. At the least, technical communicators will need to learn to document such organization's innovation and change. At best, such change invites technical communicators, acting as knowledge managers, to articulate opportunities for innovation. Research, a traditional strength of technical writing preparation, allows organizations to better prepare and understand change, turning disruption into opportunity. Postindustrial business practices are no longer the work of futurists, but the reality and structure of the workplace today. Each work site described in this article presents opportunities for basic research into emerging workplaces in need of the expertise of technical and professional writers; each is an example and potential model for knowledge work.
3. How to communicate with farmers about climate change: Farmers’ perceptions and adaptations to increasingly variable weather patterns in Maine (USA)
- Collection:
- Agricultural Communications Documentation Center (ACDC)
- Contributers:
- Jemison, John M. Jr. (author), Hall, Damon (author), Welcomer, Stephanie (author), and Haskell, Jane (author)
- Format:
- Online journal article
- Publication Date:
- 2014-07-23
- Published:
- New Leaf Associates, Inc
- Location:
- Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: 109 Document Number: D10991
- Journal Title:
- Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development
- Journal Title Details:
- 4(4):57-70
- Notes:
- 14 pages., via online journal., While dealing with weather variability has always been a source of stress for farmers, a generally warmer, wetter climate with the potential for increasingly intensive precipitation poses a threat to long-term farm viability. Knowing how farmers think about increasingly variable weather patterns (IVWP) is important for educators, agency staff, and others to learn how to work with producers on adaptation strategies to protect natural resources and prevent crop failure. In 2011, the University of Maine Cooperative Extension conducted focus group sessions with farmers from seven different commodity groups, five mixed farmer sessions, and two sessions with consultants, educators, and agency staff who work with growers to learn about grower perceptions of environmental changes, and to learn about changes they may be making to their farming operations to protect their operations from IVWP. Farmers discussed over 40 practices that could be construed as adaptation measures to buffer against IVWP. Fruit (apple and blueberry) growers spent the most time on the subject and expressed the most concern about the effects of IVWP, while dairy and potato growers spent the least. Given the divergence of opinion on the subject of climate change that Maine growers expressed, successful outreach education through the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and Cooperative Extension should likely emphasize short-term risk management, resilience, and stability of farm operations as opposed to communicating the need to adopt strategies based on climate change.
4. Ritual Communication and Use Value: The South Central Farm and the Political Economy of Place
- Collection:
- Agricultural Communications Documentation Center (ACDC)
- Contributers:
- Broad, Garrett M. (author)
- Format:
- Online journal article
- Publication Date:
- 2013
- Published:
- International Communication Association
- Location:
- Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: 99 Document Number: D10866
- Journal Title:
- Communication, Culture & Critique
- Journal Title Details:
- 6(1):20-40
- Notes:
- 21 pages., via online journal., This article offers a critical rhetorical ecofeminist analysis of the Meatless Monday campaign, a U.S.-based meat reduction initiative focused on public health and the environment. By examining the campaign's online discourse, the study sheds light on vegetarian advocacy defined by an apolitical small-steps strategy and identifies constraints on the campaign's significant empowerment potential. Extending past scholarship on how some vegetarian discourses resist and reproduce meat-eating culture's hegemonic norms of gender, race/ethnicity, class, and human–nonhuman relations, I develop and demonstrate what I call the critique of neoliberal backgrounding as an intersectional ecofeminist heuristic. I conclude that the campaign should address the meaningful consequences that its affirmation of neoliberalism has for its targeted areas of concern and for interconnected societal problems.