Angela M. Haas’s article “Race, Rhetoric, and Technology : A Case Study of Decolonial Technical Communication Theory, Methodology, and Pedagogy,” presented a new pedagogy that studies the ways in which racism still exists and affects representations of cultural groups in technology and writing. However, it also presented the egocentric writing process that most professional writers utilize in their work, often writing for an audience that is most similar to him or herself. We see that certain discriminations occur in technology all over the world. For example, in class we discussed that Siri in England uses a male voice because the people of England wouldn’t have responded as well to a female voice answering their various questions.

I thought it was interesting that a large focus of the course actually had to be spent on proving to the students that racism still exists in the present day. I also was very intrigued by the idea that being white isn’t a race or considered being ethnic but rather the absence of being ethnic. Honestly looking at it from this perspective, I think this is probably how the majority of Euro-Americans see it because of the egocentrisms associated with our cultures. No matter how open and accepting we may be there is still somehow the idea of the “other.”

Haas suggests that using an approach that makes the relationship between the designer and user more of an equal partnership that works collaboratively to understand the culture of the user in order to provide a more usable piece of writing or technology.

She also suggests that, “his framework also pushes user-centered design theorists and practitioners to interrogate the extent to which all designers imagine users that mirror themselves—and calls into question the extent to which designers are capable of imagining users different from themselves. I posit that decolonial, critical race theories, methodologies, and pedagogies have the potential to help us imagine that we are capable and that doing so will generate responsible and productive ways of imagining a diversity of users of and participants in our discipline and other technical communication workplaces,” (304).

Although I do think that these suggestions rely on the audience still being primarily of one culture, going into a specific cultural community and understanding how they best learn and what methods they find most useful would be beneficial to the writer/creator and audience.