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Domestic retrofitting is the process of adding new features, components, or technology to an existing residential building to improve its sustainability - including performance, energy efficiency, safety, functionality, and comfort. This is done by upgrading older structures to meet modern standards, such as improving insulation, replacing windows, installing new heating systems, and reducing energy consumption to lower utility costs and environmental impact. The issue of domestic retrofit has presented itself as a "wicked problem". The complex inter-relationships between policy, skills infrastructure, supply chains, finance, markets and other socio-technical issues, have made the policy difficult to formulate and implement. Expertise needs to stretch across technical subjects such as building physics and data analytics, through delivery issues such as skills and supply chain, to understanding the outcomes for people in their homes.

Equipping Technical Communicators for Social Justice Work provides action-focused resources and tools—heuristics, methodologies, and theories—for scholars to enact social justice. These resources support the work of scholars and practitioners in conducting research and teaching classes in socially just ways. Each chapter identifies a tool, highlights its relevance to technical communication, and explains how and why it can prepare technical communication scholars for socially just work.
 
For the field of technical and professional communication to maintain its commitment to this work, how social justice intersects with inclusivity through UX, technological, civic, and legal literacies, as well as through community engagement, must be acknowledged. Equipping Technical Communicators for Social Justice Work will be of significance to established scholar-teachers and graduate students, as well as to newcomers to the field.
 
Contributors: Kehinde Alonge, Alison Cardinal, Erin Brock Carlson, Oriana Gilson, Laura Gonzales, Keith Grant-Davie, Angela Haas, Mark Hannah, Kimberly Harper, Sarah Beth Hopton, Natasha Jones, Isidore Kafui Dorpenyo, Liz Lane, Emily Legg, Nicole Lowman, Kristen Moore, Emma Rose, Fernando Sanchez, Jennifer Sano-Franchini, Adam Strantz, Cana Uluak Itchuaqiyaq, Josephine Walwema, Miriam Williams, Han Yu
 

 
 

Big Data analytics is the complex process of examining big data to uncover information such as correlations, hidden patterns, trends and user and customer preferences, to allow organizations and businesses to make more informed decisions. These methods and technologies have become ubiquitous in all fields of science, engineering, business and management due to the rise of data-driven models as well as data engineering developments using parallel and distributed computational analytics frameworks, data and algorithm parallelization, and GPGPU programming. However, there remain potential issues that need to be addressed to enable big data processing and analytics in real time.

Improvisations provides readers with insights and options as they develop new lifespan writing research projects or seek to re-orient existing projects to incorporate a lifespan lens. In Part 1 of this edited collection, contributors consider research methodologies that have been adapted to the particular demands of lifespan writing research, with each methodology given two chapters: one that outlines the process of taking up the methodology, and another that provides a detailed example of the methodology in action. In Part 2, contributors suggest new methodologies for lifespan writing research and highlight challenges that this line of inquiry presents as an ethical and socially conscious research agenda. These chapters, representing both established experts and new voices in writing, literacy, and education research, will be of use to graduate students and novice researchers, accomplished researchers pivoting to this area of study for the first time, and others who want to learn more about lifespan writing research.

An interdisciplinary and insightful examination of heritage studies.

Methods and Methodologies in Heritage Studies offers succinct and accessible analyses of the current debates, intellectual legacies, and practical innovations on heritage value today. Using archaeology, anthropology, history, and geography, this multidisciplinary textbook is designed to support students, researchers, and practitioners, inviting them to review discussions of key problems and argumentative interventions in heritage studies.

A collection of essays providing insights into new directions in rhetorical history

Kathleen J. Turner’s 1998 multicontributor volume Doing Rhetorical History: Concepts and Cases quickly became a foundational text in the field, and the studies in the book have served as an important roadmap for scholars undertaking such scholarship. In the decades since its publication, developments in rhetorical-historical research, engaged scholarship, and academic interventionism have changed the practice of rhetorical history tremendously.

To address this shift, Turner and Jason Edward Black have edited a much-anticipated follow-up volume: Reframing Rhetorical History: Cases, Theories, and Methodologies, which reassesses both history as rhetoric and rhetorical history as practice. This new book attends to a number of topics that have become not just hot-button issues in rhetorical scholarship but have entrenched themselves as anchors within the field. These include digital rhetoric, public memory, race and ethnicity, gender dynamics and sexualities, health and well-being, transnationalism and globalization, social justice, archival methods and politics, and colonialism and decoloniality.

The sixteen essays are divided into four major parts: “Digital Humanities and Culture” introduces methods and cases using twenty-first century technologies; “Identities, Cultures, and Archives” addresses race and gender within the contexts of critical race theory, gendered health rhetoric, race-based public memory, and class/sectionalism; “Approaches to Nationalism and Transnationalism” explores ideologies related to US and international cultures; and “Metahistories and Pedagogies” explores creative ways to approach the frame of metarhetorical history given what the field has learned since the publication of Doing Rhetorical History.

CONTRIBUTORS
Andrew D. Barnes / Jason Edward Black / Bryan Crable / Adrienne E. Hacker Daniels / Matthew deTar / Margaret Franz / Joe Edward Hatfield / J. Michael Hogan / Andre E. Johnson / Madison A. Krall / Melody Lehn / Lisbeth A. Lipari / Chandra A. Maldonado / Roseann M. Mandziuk / Christina L. Moss / Christopher J. Oldenburg / Sean Patrick O’Rourke / Daniel P. Overton / Shawn J. Parry-Giles / Philip Perdue / Kathleen J. Turner

 

Employers today are increasingly recognizing the significance of soft skills, and students are well aware of this crucial fact. Upon graduation, students are expected to possess a firm grasp of the technical skills directly related to their completed courses, whether at the bachelor's or master's level. However, there is another realm of skills that can profoundly impact securing initial employment and, more importantly, advancing one's professional journey.