Keynote Speakers

Jennifer Sano-Franchini

Jennifer Sano-Franchini is the Gaziano Family Legacy Professor and an associate professor of English at West Virginia University. She researches the linkages between culture, meaning-making, power, and technology, and has published on a range of topics including the affective politics of Facebook’s user interface design, Asian American sonic rhetorics, and emotional labor on the academic job search in journals such as Computers and Composition, Kairos, enculturation, College Composition and Communication, and Technical Communication Quarterly, as well as edited collections including Equipping Technical Communicators for Social Justice Work, Rhetoric and Experience Architecture, and Rhetoric and the Digital Humanities. 

Sano-Franchini has held leadership roles in several national professional organizations in rhetoric and writing studies. She currently serves as Chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), and Chair of the Modern Language Association  Rhetoric, Composition, and Writing Studies History and Theory of Rhetoric Forum Executive Committee. She completed her BA and MA degrees in English at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, and her PhD in Rhetoric and Writing at Michigan State University. She also has seven years of previous industry experience as a document designer and professional writer. 

Dr. Jason Tham

Dr. Jason Tham (PhD, University of Minnesota) is an Associate Professor of Technical Communication and Rhetoric at Texas Tech University and Assistant Chair of the Department of English. He directs the User Experience (UX) Lab and serves as the faculty sponsor for the STC Student Chapter at TTU. He teaches courses in UX research, information design, instructional design, web publishing, digital rhetorics, and research methods. He is a Research Partner with the Digital Life Institute at Ontario Tech University. His current research interests are design thinking approaches in technical communication pedagogy and practice. In addition to his books––Keywords in Making (2024, Parlor Press), UX Writing: Designing User-Centered Content (2023, Routledge, with Tharon Howard and Gustav Verhulsdonck), Writing to Learn in Teams: A Collaborative Writing Playbook for Students Across the Curriculum (2023, Parlor Press, with Joe Moses), Keywords in Design Thinking (2022, WAC Clearinghouse), Design Thinking in Technical Communication (2021, Routledge), Collaborative Writing Playbook (2021, Parlor Press, with Joe Moses), and Designing Technical & Professional Communication (2021, Routledge, with Deborah Andrews)––Dr. Tham’s scholarship has appeared in Technical Communication, Journal of Technical Writing & Communication, Computers & Composition, Technical Communication Quarterly, Journal of Business & Technical Communication, and IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, among other journals and edited volumes. Dr. Tham is the editor-in-chief of Computers and Composition.