Donnie Johnson Sackey | Wayne State University (original) (raw)

Papers by Donnie Johnson Sackey

Rhetoric Review, 2018

This essay responds to recent exigencies that ask scholars to honor histories of cultural rhetori... more This essay responds to recent exigencies that ask scholars to honor histories of cultural rhetorics, engage in responsible and responsive cultural rhetorics conversations, and generate productive openings for future inquiry and practice. First, the authors open by paying homage to scholarship and programs that have made cultural rhetorics a disciplinary home. Next, they consider the varied ways in which “culture” and “rhetoric” interface in cultural rhetorics scholarship. The authors provide case studies of how cultural rhetorics inquiry shapes their scholarship across areas of rhetoric, composition, and technical communication. Finally, they close by discussing the ethics of doing cultural rhetorics work.

Circulation, Writing, & Rhetoric, 2018

We first revisit, resituate, and extend the notion of rhetorical velocity and discuss its relatio... more We first revisit, resituate, and extend the notion of rhetorical velocity and discuss its relationship to delivery and circulation through the lens of cultural mobility studies. Next we introduce a specific case study we can read through rhetorical velocity, delivery, mobilization, and circulation: a moment of civic disobedience in Lansing, Michigan. We situate graffiti as rhetorical action anchored by velocity and circulation by addressing an instance of tagging that frames graffiti art as a rhetorical tactic and community catalyst. We conclude by considering not only the reception and recomposition of texts but how the circulation and motion of texts leave impressions in and around places and spaces.

Teaching philosophy statements are ubiquitous at a particular moment in our intellectual and prof... more Teaching philosophy statements are ubiquitous at a particular moment in our intellectual and professional lives (i.e., the job search); we might, however, resituate them as living documents to multimediate, remediate, and use as a reflective space in our teaching careers. Although this particular genre is commonplace across disciplines in the Humanities, teaching philosophy statements are undertheorized, perhaps because they are typically situated in a particular moment. Because of the ubiquity of these documents, and also because of the lack of historicizing how they are prepared, how they are produced, and how they function—professionally and intellectually—in this manuscript we first provide a bit of background and context of teaching philosophy statements. We review the limited existing work on this important genre before we argue for why and how they might be attended to and rethought, especially in light of today's digital tools and multimediated ways of representing our work—and especially in the context of larger discussions about media work and professionalization. In the second section of this manuscript, we present examples from and reflect on our processes of remediating a specific type of teaching philosophy statement; we created teaching with technology philosophy statements, then remixed and remediated these traditionally prepared statements into slideshow presentations, Web sites, digital–visual collages, and digital movies. We describe the reflective and transformative work that can occur through such an activity by addressing four " emergencies " that occurred as we engaged this work. We conclude with comments about both the value of remediation and about the future of teaching philosophy statements in a multimediated world.

Baked Potato is a mobile web service geared at addressing the imbalance of power between those wh... more Baked Potato is a mobile web service geared at addressing the imbalance of power between those who market and those who consume food products. Food marketers rarely provide a detailed range of information about products that would allow consumers to understand how a product and its company connect to their cultural values. The main goal of this application is to connect people in a way that celebrates their differences and gives them agency by helping them make better decisions about their food purchases.

This paper applies ecological concepts to content production in a literal rather than metaphorica... more This paper applies ecological concepts to content production in a literal rather than metaphorical fashion. Doing so suggests a new approach for researching writing within organizational environments—an approach focused on practices in relation to textual artifacts. This paper demonstrates this new approach, using Ecofoot, the web site of the Michigan State Office of Campus Sustainability, as an object of analysis. The analysis is not a traditional " rhetorical " or digital–visual analysis of the web site. Rather it proceeds from an empirical examination of the objects, actors, and technologies at play—in visible and invisible ways—in the ongoing production of a participatory content environment.

In this poster, we present user experience research demonstrating that current tools designed to ... more In this poster, we present user experience research demonstrating that current tools designed to facilitate conference communication and organization fail to support the needs of attendees and the goals of academia in general. Current conference technologies have failed to support the scholarly exchange of ideas at conferences, both in effectively facilitating dialogue at conferences and preserving those exchanges for later scholarly purposes. We recommend new information models and interfaces that can better support how conferences actually work that, when utilized, can better facilitate the exchange of ideas and can prevent that exchange from being lost in the ether.

Boatema Boateng (2011) noted that there is an " uneasy fit " with respect to how folklore meshes ... more Boatema Boateng (2011) noted that there is an " uneasy fit " with respect to how folklore meshes with traditional notions of intellectual property. Her study of the production and circulation of adkinkra and kente textiles within and outside of Ghana cuts across issues of cultural nationalism and sovereignty in the age of globalization, which encourages the dismantling of cultural boundaries " thus offering foreign media and marketers transcultur-al wedges for forging affective links between their commodities and local communities " (Kraidy, 2005, p. 148). This highlights an interesting tension as cultural productions function between two competing poles: a) private ownership for profit and b) public availability to spur either innovation or creativity. These varying interests seem only to underscore the fact that notions of " ownership " and " usefulness, " largely from an economic standpoint, undergird the logics of copyright law and occlude the noneconomic terms by which Indigenous peoples regard and make use of life sustaining artifacts. Following Boat-eng's pursuit, we build upon growing speculation of what copyright cannot address. Specifically, we offer a paradigm that presents a different way of envisioning the complexity of how Indigenous cultural products function outside of Western tropes of intellectual property. What would it mean to do away with traditional notions of copyright driven by the exigencies of modernity in favor of paradigms that are more culturally sensitive and appropriate? With this question we explicitly inquire into the importance of ecological dimensions (e.g., landbases and biodiversity) toward rethinking how we understand " intellectual property " through an Indig-B

A report from the market research firm Ambient Insight indicated that by 2015, 25 million post-se... more A report from the market research firm Ambient Insight indicated that by 2015, 25 million post-secondary students in the United States could be enrolled in an online course (Adkins, 2011). As a consequence, they argued, we will see a decline in student enrollment in physical classrooms. In fact, the report estimated a five-year decline of 22 percent (from 14.4 million in 2010 to 4.1 million in 2015) in students attending traditional classrooms. Yet, in the face of these projections and despite innovation in educational technologies, there remains a consistent number of academics who are concerned that the quality of online instruction is not equal to face-to-face (f2f) encounters (Allen & Seaman, 2011). It is this question—a question of learning and how to facilitate high quality experiences—that we take up in this article. This question forces us to consider simultaneously: 1) what are the conditions that are necessary for learning to occur in online spaces, and 2) what are the best practices associated with effective learning these environments? To these ends, we focus on the characteristics of digital informal learning environments and on how these environments are constructed rhetorically and primarily discursively via deliberate facilitation strategies focused on encouraging learning.

We use the web site of the MSU Office of Campus Sustainability as a space for analysis. Although ... more We use the web site of the MSU Office of Campus Sustainability as a space for analysis. Although we will not be doing a traditional “rhetorical” or digital–visual analysis of the web site per se, we will use the site as a grounding point for discussion of a more ecologically aware methodology. That is, as a space to discuss the multiple factors, objects, actors, and technologies at play—in visible and invisible ways—in the production of an environment- and sustainability-focused mediaspace. We use the site to disentangle (Latour, 2005) and make visible the complex and layered actions that not only produce the site but also produce definitions that indicate how sustainability means to a local culture. Our analysis of the site displays writing research as connected to and interrogating environmental rhetorics, institutional sustainability initiatives, and community literacy in order to demonstrate the complexity of any given writing situation and the need to understand this complexity through tools attending to the complexity itself (and not just the textual artifacts). Thus, this chapter builds a theory of rhetoric and writing that refuses to see writing contained within textual objects or culture contained within artifacts. Instead, artifacts like texts help to produce culture in relation to other artifacts (Bhabha, 1994) and within complex spaces of practice.

Michel Callon presents writing devices as criti cal in assembling organizations, " constructing a... more Michel Callon presents writing devices as criti cal in assembling organizations, " constructing and objectifying services, their consumers, and, more broadly, the collective actions that make it possible to deliver services " (199). In short, he provides an approach to ontology wherein writing devices lie at the " center " as integral components of how and when infrastructures assemble. While human actors are of ten credited with inoculating these devices with their own ideologies and purposes, these nonhuman actors assume lives of their own. We use two cases drawn from our own ongoing research as a space for analy sis. Our aim is less to investigate each case in depth than to open a scholarly conversation on what it means to build, maintain, and live with nonhuman writers in our human worlds. The first case explores the dynamics of a set of durable (one-hundred year old and older) human and nonhuman actors with a focus on the rhe tori cal ecologies that grow up among the management of biological systems. The second case is a brief look at a project to construct and introduce a writing device. The functional goal of this device is to close a feedback loop between patients and primary care providers in an attempt to address systemic inequality in the quality of care for cardiovascular disease in the United States. We see the ability to trace and analyze the workings of writing devices as well as the effort of creating and maintaining them to be increasingly important (though currently not well understood) rhe tori cal work in the coming years and decades. Concerning Nonhuman Subjectivity and Place Matters For Michel Callon and John Law, the ideas of human and nonhuman agency exist as a contradiction, playing into a Cartesian paradigm that separates the cultural from the natural and limits possibilities for agentive action from non-speaking subjects. The hunt for agency of ten centers upon agents who perform themselves and those agents' intentions as subjects through the manipulation

This paper will discuss how the confluence between community-based participatory research and use... more This paper will discuss how the confluence between community-based participatory research and user-based information design is an effective approach to researching science in the public interest as seen through their application to the conceptual and methodological frameworks of two projects by the transdisciplinary research team D • VERSE (Detroit Integrated Vision for Environmental Research through Science and Engagement). D • VERSE, an example of team science, tackles complex scientific issues with community residents working as " citizen scientists. " One project assesses the health and environmental effects on residents of the southwest Detroit community of storing open piles of petcoke (a by-product of the shale oil fracking process) on the Detroit River; the second project focuses on the impact of air quality on asthmatic Detroit teenagers. This paper will also suggest a set of guidelines that other researchers might use to create research clusters similar to D • VERSE.

This article describes graduate mentorship experiences at the Writing, Information, and Digital E... more This article describes graduate mentorship experiences at the Writing, Information, and Digital Experience (WIDE) research center at Michigan State University and offers a stance on graduate student mentorship. It describes WIDE's mentorship model as feminist and inclusive and as a means to invite researchers with different backgrounds to engage in knowledge-making activities and collaborate on projects. Additionally, the article explains how WIDE enables growth for its researchers, teachers, and leaders. To illustrate these ideas, the authors provide multiple perspectives across faculty mentors, former graduate students, and current graduate students in order to discuss how WIDE researchers practice mentorship and how this mentorship prepares students for future work as scholars and researchers. Finally, the article suggests ways other research centers can adapt WIDE's approach to their own institutional context.

In this thesis, I am concerned with environmental rhetoric and its peculiar methodological predic... more In this thesis, I am concerned with environmental rhetoric and its peculiar methodological predicament. Most scholarship on environmental rhetoric builds rhetoric via textual interpretation of things produced by individuals and groups and scholars have been all too comfortable to study texts in isolation as the foundations of environmental rhetoric. While the method of rhetorical analysis is valid in producing a certain kind of knowledge, it is limited in that it sees texts as the central locus of the rhetorical situation. This thesis proposes a way of examining environmental rhetoric to where what we know as green rhetoric or green knowledge becomes more complex by tracing textual production via practices in a network. This is a work of rhetorical theory. It is a contribution that occurs twofold: 1) a method as a means of building a rhetoric and 2) an emergent rhetoric of sustainability. With these two deliverables, I am primarily assembling a careful look of how sustainability is practiced in a particular locale, thus this project can best be seen as a working model derived from practice as it occurs at Michigan State University's Office of Campus Sustainability. This thesis differs from other work on environmental rhetoric because it develops theory from practices leading to claims about a rhetoric rather than claims arising from the arbitrary interpretation of texts.

Rhetoric Review, 2018

Circulation, Writing, & Rhetoric, 2018