By Emily Sok, Published February 09, 2024
Contact: donnie.sackey@austin.utexas.edu
Twitter/X Account: https://twitter.com/donniejsackey?lang=en
Dr. Johnson Sackey’s Personal Website: https://www.donniejsackey.com/
According to Dr. Donnie Johnson Sackey’s Twitter account, he can speak German, and his research interests include technical communications and climate justice. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s Rhetoric and Writing department. He specializes in environmental rhetoric, technical communications including design, and he teaches courses on “environmental communication, information design, user-experience design, and nonprofit writing.” His upcoming book (August, 2024) titled Trespassing Nature: Species Migration and the Right to Space is an example of public writing that asks us to rethink space and belongingness in the context of species migration. “Half of earth’s species are on the move as a result of climate change,” Johnson Sackey explained, therefore, “What does it even mean to be an invasive species in this context?”
Johnson Sackey’s teaching philosophy is available here, and describes three courses he has taught, all of which have included social change, community, and design orientations. In a course titled Mobile Environments, Dr. Johnson Sackey’s students engaged with design as a rhetorical tool, where students created mobile applications that would impact communications in local environments. According to his teaching philosophy, “Mobile applications in this class have ranged from services that help students navigate the labyrinthian maze of UT’s academic and health-related support services to a peer-to-peer book exchange that allows students to retain more value of their textbooks if they could sell directly to other students.”
In a course titled Information Design, students learned through hands-on approaches how design factors, local and culturally specific, impacted communications. After reading about individual design principles, Dr. Johnson Sackey would have students engage with a problem, to teach students how to become “professionals and advocates.” Projects have included, according to his teaching philosophy, “designing voter information guides,” “data visualizations and reports on behalf of community partners.” Johnson Sackey explained, “These activities helped students recognize not only the importance of writing in everyday life, but also the power of writing to promote change.”
Take a look at some of Dr. Donnie Johnson Sackey’s publications:
- “Without Permission: Guerilla Gardening, Contested Places, Spatial Justice” (2022), in Review of Communication, available at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/15358593.2022.2133970
- “Expanding the Scope and Scale of Risk in TPC: Water Access and the Colorado River Basin” (2023), in Technical Communication Quarterly, available at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10572252.2023.2210194
- “Reciprocity in Community-Engaged Food and Environmental Justice Scholarship” (2019), in Community Literacy Journal, available at https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/communityliteracy/vol14/iss1/2/
The Virginia Community Writing Collaborative 