(Don't be) Jealous of My Boogie

This week I had the nicely titled, "Living Documents Liability versus the Need to Archive, or Why (Sometimes) History Should be Expunged" by Beverly Sauer.
Sauer identifies the problem of "living documents" (which I'll get to unpacking that in a moment) and how the use of cultural studies can help technical communicators better write about risk in high stakes occupations. Cultural analysis already deals with "economic and political dimensions of science," so it only makes sense to integrate the two fields. But it's not a one-way street: she also acknowledges that technical communicators can help cultural studies, which I will elucidate later (172).
Sauer is concerned with "living documents," which are documents that are always changing to keep up with "new information, new technologies, and changing local and institutional practices" (172). She feels that using a cultural analysis lens will help technical communicators ask questions like, who is writing the documents, for what purpose, who does it serve, and what should be included in the document (175-76). So, cultural analysis then can help technical communicators by close reading documents to analyze risk for certain times in history. And it's important for tech communicators to help cultural studies folks by cluing them into moments where writing isn't sufficient in understanding and describing risk (177-78).
Sauer uses coal mines most specifically as the subject to demonstrate how to apply cultural theory. She points out how hard it is to write standards when dealing with a high risk environment where people's lives are at stake.
This is where the issue of having "living documents" and outdated material is detrimental to workers' safety. Sauer's answer is to remove the extraneous information completely from the "living document," so that it can best indicate where potential risks are, and for workers to be able to respond appropriately (180). To be clear, she is not suggesting to throw away documents, but to remove the outdated material and store it in archives.
This brings us back to Sauer's main point that tech communicators and cultural studies theorists can work together reciprocally to make better decisions on what needs to stay in a document, what needs to be removed, and what users really need to understand from the document (186). Or, as I like to think of it: don't be jealous of my boogie, let's boogie together. (I say this because there's too much dissonance between academic disciplines, and if you know the song I'm referring to by RuPaul, then you'll know it's a good metaphor for academia.)

Questions:
Of course I gotta ask it: how to implement this into the classroom? It seems like Sauer is writing to an audience who's maybe more in the field rather than teaching it. So, it seems hard to put this into practice in a classroom, but it is important to think about. Do you think students would be receptive to working with cultural studies folks? As I mentioned in my parenthetical comments, the sciences and humanities don't get along so well. I have never understood this, other than we're just skeptical of each other because we don't understand each other enough. Sauer's idea of bringing the two together are spot on (we could get a whole lot more done if we had each other's backs), but what needs to happen first?

Connections:
Graybill: Like Sauer, Graybill also argues that cultural studies can help tech communicators identify problems of authority and create social change (151-52). Unlike Sauer, Graybill goes into specific detail on methodologies, which makes me think his piece was written more for teachers of writing, rather than how Sauer seems to be talking to professionals in the field.

Britt: Calling for cultural studies into tech communication, but also adding sociology and anthropology to look at institutions (134). I find it very interesting how Britt is calling for a critique of "microinstitutions" like a writing center (135). Disciplines are too small and "macroinsitutions" are too big. Britt sees that institutions get too big and stop accounting for itself, so that's where cultural studies et al. can help bring into focus what goals an institution has and if they need changes. I like the idea of bringing the wc into the mix, but the problem there is that it has no real power to change institutional power, and wc's are now going through a shift since computers have entered the mix.

I also wonder about the Russell article from earlier this semester. It was the one where he said that lit crit should say out of tech and professional writing classes. Kind of seems like maybe that argument has been blown out of the water, but I still wonder if Russell has a point in keeping the two separate.