Community | Environment | Design
Donnie Johnson Sackey
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I earned my BAs (Latin and English) at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, MA (Critical Studies in Literacy & Pedagogy), and PhD (Rhetoric & Writing) at Michigan State University. Currently, I am associate professor in the Department of Rhetoric & Writing at the the University of Texas at Austin where I teach courses in environmental communication, information design, and user-experience design. I serve on the steering committee of the Polymathic Scholars Honors Program and the Bridging the Disciplines Smart Cities faculty panel. My research centers on the dynamics of environmental public policy deliberation, environmental justice, and environmental community-based participatory research. My research has appeared in Communication Design Quarterly, Community Literacy Journal, Present Tense, Rhetoric Review, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Technical Communication Quarterly, and various edited collections. I am a non-resident fellow with the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University.
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Sackey, Donnie Johnson. (2025). A case for black user experience design. Teaching User Experience: A Process Approach, edited by, Heather N. Turner and Emma J. Rose. 1st ed., Routledge, 2025. [Access]
Sackey, Donnie Johnson. (2025). Rhetorical encounters with life out of bounds. Rhetoric Society Quarterly 55(3): 314-325. [Access]
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Sackey, Donnie Johnson. (2025). Environmental justice and social change: Opportunities for action. In N. N. Jones, L. Gonzales, A. M. Haas, & M. F. Williams (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Social Justice in Technical and Professional Communication, (1st ed., pp. 8). Routledge. [Access] ​
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To review additional publications, please review my curriculum vita available here.
Book Project
Technical and professional communication has a problem with how the concept of risk has been considered alongside extractive technologies. Throughout its history, the practice, teaching, and research of technical and professional communication has been embedded within, complicit with, and indebted to these industries. These industries have also created massive global harm to people and ecosystems, both through accidents as well as the slow violence of pollution and climate change. In response, this book seeks to "undermine" how technical and professional communication works with risk by reconsidering implications that traverse a greater span of time and geography. It revises the field's risk methodology and encourages future researchers to navigate the scope and scale of their projects. Along with new theoretical framing, the text presents three detailed case studies illustrating how careful consideration of scope and scale can impact how technical and professional communication engages extraction and risk, showcasing to new and experienced technical communication researchers alike how risk communication is about to enter a new era.
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State University of New York Press. Forthcoming June 2026.
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Description: Cover for Undermining Risk and Technical Communication: Extractive Industry, Cascading Disaster, and the Global Climate Crisis. The image features a pit mine with several layers beneath an open dark sky.
