Community | Environment | Design
Donnie Johnson Sackey
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I am currently an assistant professor of rhetoric & writing at the the University of Texas at Austin. I teach courses in environmental communication, information design, user-experience design, and nonprofit writing. Previously, I was a founding member and senior researcher with Detroit Integrated Vision for Environmental Research through Science and Engagement (D•VERSE) and an affiliated senior research with Michigan State University’s Writing in Digital Environments (WIDE) center. Additionally, I served as an executive board member for the Michigan Environmental Justice Coalition, which works to achieve a clean, healthy, and safe environment for Michigan’s most vulnerable residents in alignment with the Principles of Environmental Justice. My research centers on the dynamics of environmental public policy deliberation, environmental justice, and environmental community-based participatory research.
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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]
Le Rouge, Mary, Clancy Ratliff, and Donnie Johnson Sackey. (2022). Using Situational Analysis to Reimagine Infrastructure. Communication Design Quarterly, 10(3): 56-66. [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?
Our living world;. New York :S. Hess,[1885].
Lithograph showing several plant and insect species. Both a cicada and lantern fly are prominently featured in the image.
teaching philosophy