Johanna Phelps

Biography

Johanna Phelps joined the faculty at Washington State University in 2017. She is the recipient of the 2026-2031 Lewis E. and Stella G. Buchanan Distinguished Associate Professorship and serves as Director of Community Engagement for WSU Vancouver. In 2026, she was appointed Editor of WAC Clearinghouse’s Practices and Possibilities series; from 2024 to 2026, she served as Associate Editor with the Clearinghouse’s Perspectives on Writing series. Alongside many articles and book chapters, she’s the author of Engaging Research Communities in Writing Studies: Ethics, Public Policy, and Research Design (Routledge, 2021).

Phelps’s pre-WSU professional experience continues to inform her research and scholarship. After earning her BA, Phelps served two years as an AmeriCorps VISTA, working as a community partnership and risk management coordinator for Weber State University’s Center for Community Engaged Learning. She subsequently managed an AmeriCorps program, enrolling over 1,200 undergraduate students to support nonprofits across the state of Utah. After completing her PhD coursework 2013-2015, she worked full-time as an Institutional Review Board coordinator at Utah State University.

At Washington State University, her professional experiences with community-engaged pedagogies and research ethics have become praxis. She conducts empirical research on pedagogies, with a focus on community-engaged curricula. Her theoretical work on axiological principles and the ethics of research serves as both a contribution to the field, but also as a framework for her teaching, research, and service.

Education

• PhD in Rhetoric and Composition, University of South Florida (2017)
• MPA (Public Administration), University of South Florida (2016)
• Graduate Certificate, Professional & Technical Writing, University of South Florida (2015)
• MA English, Weber State University, Ogden, UT (2010)
• BA Philosophy & German, University of New Mexico (2009)

Selected Publications

• Phelps, J. (2026). “Collaborative wayfinding: Logistics of community-engaged teaching.” In S. Rakosi Rosenbloom, B. Ludwig, and K. Kenneavy (eds.), How to Facilitate Community-Engaged Learning (pp. 14-31), Edward Elgar Publishing.
• Jenkins, M., Phelps, J., Bletscher, C., Whatcott, S., Luett, S., and Sekhar, P. (2025). “Standardizing assessment measures for community-engaged undergraduate STEM curricula: Towards durable skill development and assessment in the technical writing ‘service’ course and beyond.” In Proceedings of the 43^rd ACM International Conference on Design of Communication (pp. 103-113). doi: https://doi.org/10.1145/3711670.3764626
• Phelps, J. (2025). “Ethics in Communication Research.” In D. Ross (Ed.), The Handbook of Ethics in Technical and Professional Communication. Routledge.
• Phelps, J. (2022). Concomitant ethics: Technical communication, Institutional Review Boards, and the social justice turn. Journal of Business and Technical Communication special issue on 21^st Century Ethics in Technical Communication. doi.org/10.1177/10506519221087709
• Phelps, J. (April 2021) Engaging Research Communities in Writing Studies: Ethics, Public Policy, and Research Design Routledge Research in Writing Studies Series. doi.org/10.4324/9781003082002
• Phelps, J. (2021). The transformative paradigm: Equipping technical communication researchers for socially just work. Technical Communication Quarterly, 30(2), 204-215. doi.org/10.1080/10572252.2020.1803412
• Clegg, G., Lauer, J., Phelps, J. and Melonçon, L. (2021). Programmatic outcomes in undergraduate technical and professional communication programs. Technical Communication Quarterly, 30(1), 19-33. doi.org/10.1080/10572252.2020.1774662. Equal authorship.
• Phelps, J. (2020). Language matters: Meaning making in the federal re-definition of “vulnerable.” Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric and Society, 8(2). https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10572252.2020.1774662
• Neely, S., Cogburn, J. and Phelps-Hillen, J. (2018). Measuring the practice of engagement in public administration. Teaching Public Administration, 36(3), 276-300. doi.org/10.1177/0144739418775783
• Phelps-Hillen, J. (2018). Updates to the ‘Common Rule’: Implications for international service-learning and community engagement research. International Journal of Research on Service-Learning and Community Engagement, 5(1), 119-128.
• Phelps-Hillen, J. (2017). Inception to implementation: Feminist community engagement via service-learning. Reflections: A Journal of Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric, 17(1), 113-132.

Research interests

• Research Ethics and Empiricism in Writing Studies
• Technical and Professional Communication Pedagogies
• Community Engaged Curricula
• Institutional Infrastructures
• Program Design and Assessment