The Ken Rainey Award recipient will be officially honored at the 2023 STC Technical Communication Summit & Expo Honors Event & Lunch on Tuesday, 16 May 2023, in Atlanta, GA.
The Ken Rainey Award for Distinguished Research honors the distinguished research contributions of Dr. Rainey. Ken Rainey was a professor at Southern Polytechnic State University (now Kennesaw State University) and STC Fellow who produced major research studies that continue to provide ongoing benefit to both practice and teaching in the field of technical communication.
The Ken Rainey Award honors research that has made positive, significant contributions to technical communication practice and teaching. It rewards a lifetime of quality research in the field, a single high-quality empirical study, or a set of related high-quality studies.
The Society for Technical Communication is pleased to announce Dr. Miriam Williams as the 2023 recipient of the Ken Rainey Award for Distinguished Research.
Dr. Williams has made a lifetime of contributions applying her experience in public policy to technical communication research and turning the field’s attention to technical communication’s role in ongoing issues of racial injustice. One letter in support of her nomination acknowledges Dr. Williams’ achievements “in editing key journals in the field, in contributions to important scholarship on race at the intersection across scientific and technical disciplines, and in service of local and national service that redresses institutional racism.” Her research has “has modeled an archival, analytical method for understanding both historical and contemporary documents.” In particular, this award celebrates Dr. Williams’ “methodological innovation and connecting the field’s foundational genres (like regulatory writing and policy) to historically underexamined issues, including racial inequity and justice.” The Ken Rainey Award recognizes Dr. Williams for “research that not only is good in its methods and treatment of texts, but it also does good in the field and in the world.”
The STC Board thanks the Ken Rainey Award committee – Sara Doan (Chair), Kylie Jacobsen, Julie Gerdes, Bremen Vance, April O'Brien, Amelia Chelsey, Kristin Bennett, and Shyam Pandey – for their work this year.