Natasha N. Jones is an American technical communication scholar at Michigan State University whose work applies social justice frameworks to technical and professional communication, examining how documentation practices can harm or serve marginalized communities.
Core ideas
- Social justice in technical communication: Jones argues that technical communication is never neutral — documentation practices, usability testing, and information design carry assumptions about whose needs matter and whose knowledge counts. Technical communicators must attend to how their work affects communities with unequal access to power [@jones2016].
- Coalitional approaches: rather than designing for communities, Jones advocates coalitional approaches that design with communities — centering the expertise and agency of the people affected by documentation and technology.
- Narrative as technical communication: Jones’s research demonstrates that narrative — typically excluded from “technical” writing — is a legitimate and often necessary mode for communicating technical information in community contexts, challenging the discipline’s genre boundaries.
Notable works
- “Coalitional Learning in the Contact Zones: Inclusion and Narrative Inquiry in Technical Communication and Composition Studies” (2016)
- “The Technical Communicator as Advocate: Integrating a Social Justice Approach in Technical Communication” (2016)
Related
- language and power — Jones’s work makes explicit how technical communication encodes power relations
- technical writing — the discipline Jones’s work critiques and extends
- audience — Jones challenges technical communication to account for audiences typically excluded from design processes