Publications

Full CV is available as a PDF here.


Books

Amidon, T. R., Pflugfelder, E. H., Richards, D. P., & Sackey, D. J. (2026). Undermining risk in technical communication: Extractive industry, cascading disaster, and the global climate crisis. SUNY Press. Forthcoming June 2026. 

Richards, D. P. (Ed.). (2020). On teacher neutrality: Politics, praxis, and performativity. Utah State University Press.

Moore, K. R., & Richards, D. P. (Eds.). (2018). Posthuman praxis in technical communication. Routledge: Studies in Technical Communication, Rhetoric, and Culture Series.


Articles

Richards, D. P. (2025). Dead man’s switch: Blame and causality in the epideictic scenes of disaster. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 55(1), 26-41.

Pflugfelder, E. H., Amidon, T. R., Sackey, D. J., & Richards, D. P. (2023). Expanding the scope and scale of risk in TPC: Water access and the Colorado River Basin. Technical Communication Quarterly, 32(3), 224–241.

Richards, D. P., & Stephens, S. H. (2022). Do voices really make a difference? Investigating the value of local video narratives in risk perceptions and attitudes towards sea-level rise. Technical Communication, 69(4), 79–96. *Included in the “Best Original Collection of Essays in Technical or Scientific Communication” (CCCC Technical and Scientific Communication Awards).

Richards, D. P., & Jacobson, E. E. (2022). How real is too real? User-testing the effects of realism as a risk communication strategy in sea level rise visualizations. Technical Communication Quarterly, 31(2), 190–206. 

Amidon, T. R., Nielsen, A. C., Pflugfelder, E. H., Richards, D. P., & Stephens, S. H. (2021). Visual risk literacy in “Flatten the Curve” COVID-19 visualizations. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 35(1), 101–109. 

Stephens, S. H., & Richards, D. P. (2020). Story mapping and sea level rise: Listening to global risks at street level. Communication Design Quarterly, 8(1), 5–18. 

Richards, D. P. (2019). John Dewey, nonhuman agency, and the possibility of a posthuman public. Contemporary Pragmatism, 16(4), 366–95.

Richards, D. P. (2019). An ethic of constraint: Citizens, sea-level rise viewers, and the limits of agency. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 33(3), 292–337.

Richards, D. P. (2018). Not a cape, but a life preserver: The importance of designer localization in interactive sea level rise viewers. Communication Design Quarterly, 6(2), 57–69. 

Richards, D. P. (2017). Dwelling in the ruins: Recovering student use of metaphor in the posthistorical university. Composition Forum, 37, compositionforum.com/issue/37

Beale, M. C., McKittrick, M. L., & Richards, D. P. (2016). “Good” grief: Praxis, subversion, and the ethics of griefing guides. Technical Communication Quarterly, 25(3), 191–201.

Richards, D. P. (2015). Testing the waters: Local users, sea level rise, and the productive usability of interactive geovisualizations. Communication Design Quarterly, 3(3), 25-29.

Richards, D. P. (2011). Digitizing Dewey: Blogging an ethic of community. Computers and Composition Online, Fall 2011 Issue (Special Issue: Ethics in a Digital Age, Virtual Classroom), cconlinejournal.org/ethics_special_issue/richards/


Special Issues

Richards, D. P., & Phelps, L. W. (Eds.). (2020). Special Issue: On Ideological Transparency. Introduction: “Ideological transparency across landscapes of learning,” Pedagogy, 20(1), 3–12.


Book Chapters

Richards, D. P. (2024). Let’s party: Composing a review of the literature on a technical topic. In K. St.Amant & P. Zemliansky (Eds.), Technical writing spaces: Readings on writing (vol. 6) (pp. 87-102). Parlor Press; The WAC Clearinghouse.

Richards, D. P. (2023). Flood Insurance Rate maps as communicative sites of pragmatic environmental action. In S. Williams (Ed.), Technical communication for environmental action (pp. 95–120). SUNY Press.

Richards, D. P. (2022). Place-based podcasting: From orality to electracy in Norfolk, Virginia. In M. J. Faris, C. S. Danforth, & K. D. Stedman (Eds.), Amplifying soundwriting pedagogies: Integrating sound into rhetoric and writing (pp. 301-314). The WAC Clearinghouse, UP of Colorado, doi.org/10.37514/PRA-B.2022.1688.2.22

Yusuf, J-E., Nicula, J. G., Richards, D. P., Agim, O., Covi, M., & Anuar, K. A. (2021). Engaging residents in policy and planning for sea level rise: Application of the Action-oriented Stakeholder Engagement for a Resilient Tomorrow (ASERT) framework. In J.-E. (Wie) Yusuf & B. St. John III (Eds.), Communicating climate change: Making environmental messaging accessible (pp. 36-57). Routledge, doi.org/10.4324/9781003037378

Richards, D. P. (2019). Emergent publics, public emergencies: the importance of John Dewey in Jane Bennett’s nonhuman politics of vital materialism. In R. Danisch (Ed.), Recovering overlooked pragmatists in communication: Extending the living conversation about pragmatism and rhetoric (pp. 197–222). Palgrave Macmillan.

Richards, D. P. (2017). Reconstituting causality: Accident reports as posthuman documentation. In D. G. Ross (Ed.), Topic-driven environmental rhetoric (pp. 149–167). Routledge.

Richards, D. P. (2015). The (re)naturalization of Margaret Cavendish: Making active the relationship between nature and female subjectivity in Blazing World. In J. Chappelle & K. S. Stanton (Eds.), Spectacle, sex, and property in eighteenth-century literature and culture (pp. 83–104). AMS Press, digitalcommons.odu.edu/english_fac_pubs/191


Professional Publications

Richards, D. P. (2017). The problem of agency in visual risk communication. Intercom: The Magazine of the Society for Technical Communication, 64(4), 20–22.


Proceedings

Welhausen, C., Bivens, K., & Richards, D. P. (2023). Exploring the feasibility of a domain- specific DAta ReposiTory (DART) for scholars in technical and professional communication. In Proceedings of the 41st ACM International Conference on Design of Communication (SIGDOC ’23), October 26-27, 2023. Association for Computing Machinery, pp. 255–257, doi.org/10.1145/3615335.3623060

Allen, T. R., Richards, D. P., Whytlaw, J. L., McLeod, G., Cronin, J., Miles, J. J., Reiblich, J., Davis, C., & VanGraafeiland, K. (2022). A geospatial hub to support wind energy and maritime activity spaces near Hampton Roads, Virginia, U.S.A. Proceedings of OCEANS 2022, Hampton Roads, Oct. 17-20, pp. 1-5, doi.org/10.1109/ OCEANS47191.2022.9976992

Gonzales, L., Itchuaqiyaq, C. U., Kramer, C., Lindgren, C., Nur Cooley, S., Richards, D. P., Rose, E., & Sharp-Hoskins, K. (2022). UX in/as political re-negotiation (Extended Abstract). Proceedings of the 2022 IEEE International Professional Communication Conference (ProComm), doi.org/10.1109/ProComm53155.2022.00089

Richards, D. P., Whytlaw, J. L., Allen, T. R., Miles, J. J., McLeod, G., & Cronin, J. J. A. (2021). User experience design as a framework for political negotiation in environmental decision making about wind energy. In Proceedings of the 39th ACM International Conference on Design of Communication (SIGDOC ’21), October 12-14, Virtual Event. Association for Computing Machinery, pp. 231–239, doi.org/ 10.1145/3472714.3473646

Richards, D. P., & Ball, D. K. (2020). Facilitating flood fluency: The design and utility of a flood risk calculator based on FEMA’s National Flood Insurance Program. In Proceedings of the 38th ACM International Conference on Design of Communication (SIGDOC ’20), October 5-9, Virtual Event. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA (10 pgs.), doi.org/10.1145/3380851.3416775

Stephens, S. H., & Richards, D. P. (2018). Mapping coastal residents’ stories to communicate about sea level rise. AGU (American Geophysical Union) Fall Meeting Abstracts, PA42C-06, https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2018AGUFMPA42C..06S

Richards, D. P. (2017). The challenges of exploring local place as a context of use in the study of interactive risk visualizations. In Proceedings of the 35th ACM International Conference on Design of Communication (SIGDOC ’17), August 11-13, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Association for Computing Machinery, 7 pgs., doi.org/10.1145/3121113.3121208

Jovanovic, V., Richards, D. P., Popescu, O., McKittrick, M. L., Tombolato-Terzic, D., Pazos, P., & Romberger, J. (2017). Developing a faculty learning community to support writing across different STEM disciplines. In Proceedings of 124th American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Annual Conference & Exposition (11 pgs.), June 25–28, 2017, Columbus, OH, USA, doi.org/10.18260/1-2–28130

Richards, D. P. (2016). Helping local residents make informed decisions with interactive risk visualization tools. In Proceedings of the 34th ACM International Conference on Design of Communication (SIGDOC ’16), September 23-24, Silver Spring, MD, USA. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 6 pgs., doi.org/ 10.1145/2987592.2987626

Jovanovic, V., Richards, D. P., McKittrick, M. L., Pazos, P., & Romberger, J. (2015). Comparatively mapping genres in academic and workplace engineering environments. In Proceedings of 122nd American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Annual Conference & Exposition (13 pgs.), June 14-17, 2015, Seattle, WA, doi.org/10.18260/p.23709


Proceedings (Editor)

Amidon, T. R., Pflugfelder, E. H., & Richards, D. P. (Eds.). (2019). Proceedings of the 37th ACM International Conference on Design of Communication (SIGDOC ’19), October 4-6, Portland, OR, USA, Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA. ISBN: 978-1-4503-6790-5, doi.org/10.1145/3328020

Richards, D. P. (Eds.). (2018). Special Issue: Proceedings from and future plans for the Symposium for Communicating Complex Information (SCCI). Communication Design Quarterly, 6(1), 54 pgs., doi.org/10.1145/3230970.3230971


Reviews

Richards, D. P. (2018). Review of Roger Graves and Theresa Hyland’s (Eds.) Writing Assignments across University Disciplines. Canadian Journal for Studies in Discourse and Writing/Rédactologie, 28, 270–80. 

Richards, D. P.  (2013). Review of Dmitri Stanchevici’s Stalinist Genetics: The Constitutional Rhetoric of T.D. Lysenko. Technical Communication Quarterly, 22(4), 363–65.

Richards, D. P. (2012). Review of Susan Miller-Cochran and Rochelle L. Rodrigo’s (Eds.) Rhetorically Rethinking Usability: Theories, Practices, and Methodologies. Computers and Composition, 28(2), 175–79.


Dissertation

Richards, D. P. (2013). Dead man’s switch: Disaster rhetorics in a posthuman age. (Publication No. 3604176) [Doctoral dissertation, University of South Florida]. ProQuest Dissertations.