Technical and Engineering Communication; Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion in Higher Education
Dr. Kristen R. Moore’s research focuses on strategies for intervening in mundane injustices, particularly within public-facing technical communication and equity and inclusion efforts in the academy.
Her most recent co-authored book, Technical Communication After the Social Justice Turn: Building Coalitions for Action, provides the field of Technical Communication with foundational definitions of justice and oppression and theorizes coalitional work within three key concepts: power, privilege, and positionality. Moore, along with co-authors Dr. Rebecca Walton (Utah State) and Dr. Natasha Jones (Michigan State) propose a strategy for redressing inequity (the 4Rs), which includes four discrete steps: recognize, reveal, reject, and replace. As a heuristic, the 4Rs help bridge the gap between Recognizing injustice and oppression and Replacing the systems that uphold them. Currently Moore (along, with Jones and Walton) are conducting an empirical study to understand the ways members of the TC and STEM community engage with each of the 4Rs in their equity and inclusion work. Results from this study are forthcoming in Technical Communication and ASEE Conference Proceedings.
As the director of the Community-based User Experience Lab (the CUE Lab), Moore engages with projects that illumine the ways community members, particularly those from marginalized communities, experience the sociotechnical systems that dictate daily practices, constrain movement and decision-making, and enable change-making within local and regional contexts, including the local Buffalo area and the University at Buffalo and SUNY systems. Currently, Moore (along with graduate students Nicole Lowman and Kehinde Alonge), is studying attempts to address police brutality and overreach through Citizen Police Oversight Agencies. As sites of public technical communication, these organizations are examples of the ways that mundane injustices coalesce to enable structural oppression. Results from this study are forthcoming in Equipping Technical Communicators for Social Justice Work: Theories, Methodologies, and Pedagogies and under review in a number of venues.
Moore’s research engages a range of research methodologies, theories and topics. In addition to the 4Rs and policing studies, current project topics include:
a) Teaching Technical and Engineering Communication with a focus on policy/regulatory writing and information/data design
b) Engineering Justice, Equity, and Inclusion with a focus on building inclusive practices in the academy, including mentoring, hiring, and others.
c) Politics of Citation Studies with a focus on the ways we can address inequities by broadening our citation practices in Technical Communication and Engineering Education.
S-STEM: JEDI Scholars Program. National Science Foundation. Rajan Batta, PI. Kristen R. Moore, Letitia Thomas, Harrison Kelly, Co-PIs. August 2022. $374,998 / $1,499,993