Download PDFContents
Outlining the STOP AAPI HATE Initiative
Linking the STOP AAPI HATE Reports and Cultural Rhetorics
Assembling a Cultural Rhetorics Methodology: Decolonial, Indigenous, and Feminist Theory
Critiquing the STOP AAPI HATE Reports
Reimagining Future Options for STOP AAPI HATE Data
Imagining a Cultural Rhetorics-Informed Future for Technical Communication
Reimagining Future Options for STOP AAPI HATE Data
Although my methodology exposes various flaws within the well-intentioned STOP AAPI HATE initiative’s data collection and presentation practices, I also assert that the same perspective can bolster the initiative’s commitment to social justice and AAPI communities using the pillars of cultural rhetorics. Furthermore, as the current field of technical communication continues to focus on the concepts of digital mediums, user interactivity, and user accessibility, cultural rhetorics can provide additional ways to engage with these practices. With user and community feedback continually influencing today’s technical communication forms, communicators must critically consider their audience while designing documents, reports, or other stakeholder-intended media.
In her influential piece on technical writing, Miller (1979) states, “To ... engage in any communication, is to participate in a community; to write well is to understand ... the concepts, values, traditions, and style which permit identification with that community” (p. 617). By collecting and sharing these valuable AAPI stories, the STOP AAPI HATE initiative is building an important community, providing digital space of resistance for marginalized AAPIs to speak freely about their experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using my suggestions below, which I consider to be new options for the current text-based summative report, I aim to show how the STOP AAPI HATE initiative could further encourage the wider AAPI community to engage with their important activist project.
First, I strongly believe that the STOP AAPI HATE initiative should allow incident reporters to share their stories in photo or video formats, eliminating the project’s sole reliance on alphabetic text as a storytelling medium. As mentioned previously, the initiative’s current dependence on English alphabetic text stories limits non-English-speaking accessibility and overall user creativity. Medina (2016) espouses the values of non-textual storytelling in a digital world, stating “Multimodal genre ... has the potential to more effectively communicate messages than purely alphabetic texts because the genre draws rhetorical power from additional semiotic resources and experiential knowledge” (para. 3). In Medina’s digital testimonios, community members utilize both pictures and videos to create layered, powerful presentations.
Multimodal storytelling opposes the notion that stories can only assume textual forms in a digital world. By engaging with a user’s sight and hearing in new ways, visual storytelling through photos and videos can encourage embodiment for a viewer or listener, further encouraging relational understanding and empathy between the user and the storyteller. Furthermore, multimodal storytelling presents the user with more mediums for self-expression, giving them creative options on how to tell their own story through digital means. Text, in comparison to its audio and video counterparts, tends to homogenize the format and appearance of stories, stripping them of their uniqueness and nuance. As Johnson (2018) states, “We are always creating meaning through available resources, many of which enact modes beyond alphabetic, calling for new approaches to composing that stress the materiality within a particular rhetorical situation” (p. 21). Videos and audio recordings are powerful, engaging with a user’s senses and increasing relationality of stories. By allowing users to submit video and audio pieces alongside textual stories, the STOP AAPI HATE initiative can take advantage of their digital platform by allowing the AAPI community to engage and spread the message of the project in multiple different ways.
Second, I suggest that the STOP AAPI HATE initiative use their digital platform to create a publicly visible database that houses all AAPI stories. While the current summative report data presentations are helpful for visualizing data trends across incident report submissions, they fail to publish many vulnerable, important AAPI stories. The initiative can escape the restrictive bounds of the current summative report by making all stories viewable within a searchable, updated database, giving users access to a multitude of new AAPI experiences and perspectives. I believe that this shift towards a more public display of story accomplishes two cultural rhetorics-inspired goals: (1) the shift makes all stories (even those previously silenced or not published) visible to the AAPI community and (2) the shift decenters the STOP AAPI HATE initiative as the sole powerful entity in charge of which stories get told. Reinforcing the need for collaborative, decentered projects within technical communication, Jones et al. (2016) state, “Not merely users but active cocreators, citizens of all kinds require technical communication that demands more expansive, inclusive approaches to communication practices” (p. 7). With this potential database model encouraging an inclusive, transparent view of STOP AAPI HATE stories and data, both the initiative and its participants can participate in collaborative meaning-making while constellating their multimodal stories and experiences. By escaping the bounds of the summative report altogether, and by making all stories visible in a database, the STOP AAPI HATE initiative gives AAPI users the potential chance to shape a more expansive, inclusive project.
Lastly, I also believe that the STOP AAPI HATE initiative could benefit from the creation of a digital community forum, where the initiative and AAPI community members could freely share stories, project updates, and general conversation. This forum-like structure again provides users with the option to make their voices heard, while also encouraging communication and relationship building between the initiative and incident report submitters. Additionally, the forum provides the initiative with a way to constellate AAPI community members and their experiences, providing a solid, organic community hub for inspired collective activist efforts. According to Miller (1979), “Certainty is found not in isolated observation of nature or in logical procedure but in the widest agreement with other people” (p. 616). Forums help foster tight-knit communities, and those communities can collectively promote progressive societal change, this change being the end goal of the STOP AAPI HATE initiative.
In summation, I promote the creation of an online forum for the STOP AAPI HATE initiative because these digital spaces potentially engage with multiple tenets of cultural rhetorics: relational community building, the constellation of embodied experiences, and story sharing as a driving force for change. Additionally, by presenting both the database model and the forum model as options that work towards digital decolonization, I encourage the STOP AAPI HATE initiative to move beyond the antiquated textual report model towards more community-oriented mediums.