Languages, Infrastructures, and Ecologies

This article reports on the three sessions of the 2021 ATTW Virtual Conference including the Keynote Address and connects them to three other sessions through the lens of social justice to navigate the intersections of language, access, material ecologies, and social infrastructures. Echoing the conference theme, I suggest that those sessions attend to material complexities and local conditions and help us recognize culturally and locally responsive approaches to discursive activities in research and pedagogy in the field of TPC and that this work helps technical communicators and educators sustain and advance disciplinary identities of which social justice scholarship is a central part. By using my reflections on the observed ATTW sessions, I conclude that we can adopt what I term ethical pragmatism as an actionable takeaway, which refers to practical approaches grounded in each community’s history, culture, and sociomaterial conditions.