Liminality: The Work of Resilience in Technical Communication
Edited by Miriam F. Williams and Lisa Melonçon
Designed by Mike Palmquist.
The chapters in this edited collection represent the final essays accepted for publication in Technical Communication, the journal of the Society for Technical Communication (STC). In January 2025, after the STC filed for bankruptcy and ceased operation, we brought together these essays for publication. Scholarship in the field of technical and professional communication (TPC) has always resided in something of a liminal space—between academics and practitioners; between the classroom and the workplace; between subject matter expertise and writing and communication expertise. This liminality has been a hallmark and a strength of TPC. Bringing together scholars and practitioners, this volume exemplifies the diverse range of work that technical and professional communicators do. The chapters illustrate various component parts of the field’s identity and what it has long valued. Equally important, this collection demonstrates the resilience of ideas that has long defined TPC as a field and a practice.
Miriam F. Williams is Professor of English in Texas State University’s Department of English. Before joining Texas State in 2004, she worked for eight years with State of Texas agencies as a caseworker, health and safety investigator, policy analyst, policy writer/editor, and program administrator of rules and regulations. Her books and articles focus on public policy writing, plain language, race and ethnicity, and archival research. She is co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Social Justice in Technical and Professional Communication (2025), a co-editor of Communicating Race, Ethnicity, and Identity in Technical Communication (Routledge, 2014), and the author of From Black Codes to Recodification: Removing the Veil from Regulatory Writing (Routledge, 2010). She served as Editor-in-Chief of the Society for Technical Communication’s journal, Technical Communication, from 2020 to 2025.
Lisa Melonçon is Professor of Technical Communication and chair of the department of Interdisciplinary Studies at Clemson University. She is widely published on programmatic and pedagogical issues in TPC, accessibility, and the rhetoric of health and medicine. You can learn more about her at http://tek-ritr.com .
Publication Information:
Williams, Miriam F., & Lisa Melonçon (Eds.). (2026). Liminality: The Work of Resilience in Technical Communication. The WAC Clearinghouse; University Press of Colorado. https://doi.org/10.37514/TPC-B.2026.2869
Foundations and Innovations in Technical and Professional Communication
Series Editor: Lisa Melonçon, Clemson University
This book is available in whole and in part in Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF). It will also be available in a low-cost print edition from our publishing partner, the University Press of Colorado .
