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 assistant professor in the Department of Rhetoric & Writing at the the University of Texas at Austin where I teach courses in environmental communication, information design, user-experience design, and nonprofit writing. 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, Technical Communication Quarterly, and various edited collections. I am a non-resident fellow with the Center on Global Energy Policy's CarbonTech Development Initiative at Columbia University. I'll be continuing to do work with the center over the next couple years, which will support several ongoing research projects.
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Sackey, Donnie Johnson. (2024). How community means. Community Literacy Journal, 18(2): 50-55. [Access]
Amidon, Timothy R. and Donnie Johnson Sackey. (2024). Justice in/and the design of AI risk detection technologies. In SIGDOC '24: Proceedings of the 42nd ACM International Conference on Design of Communication (pp. 81–93). [Access]
Pflugfelder, Ehren H., Timothy R. Amidon, Donnie Johnson Sackey, and Daniel P. Richards. (2023). Expanding the scope and scale of risk in TPC: Water access and the Colorado River Basin. Technical Communication Quarterly, 23(3): 224-241. [Access]
Sackey, Donnie Johnson. (2022). Without permission: Guerilla gardening, contested places, spatial justice. Review of Communication, 22(4): 364-377. [Access]
To review additional publications, please review my curriculum vita available here.
Book Project
While science encourages us to focus on a species’ movement through environment and thus privileges natural ecosystems, species also exist within a discursive ecology. What happens when we consider the ways in which physical and discursive worlds interact in conflicts over species’ movement? And how might a study of these interactions present opportunities for better environmental deliberation and action? The identification of a species as an invader is not merely an innocuous scientific act; it is also a cultural and political decision that reverberates through biotic communities. Our conversations should reflect this reality.
The futurity of migration due to climate change creates a necessity for revising our understanding of what it means to be native or invasive by expanding our notions of sociobiotic belongingness and the right to space. Trespassing Natures: Species Migration and the Right to Space offers such an intervention by shifting our attention away from the belief that a single species threatens space by questioning issues of space, identity, and institutions that make human participation apparent and asks us to reconsider our roles and expand our idea of community. Half of Earth’s species are on the move as a result of climate change. What does it even mean to be an invasive species in this context?
Use "SACKEY" to apply 30% discount on paperback.
The Ohio State University Press. Forthcoming August 2024.
Cover Design: Brad Norr
Description: Cover for Trespassing Natures: Species Migration and the Right to Space. The images features a run of mackerel swimming together in close formation. Some of the mackerel are moving between the letters.
