Angela Pennington PhD Student - Technical Communication and Rhetoric

Angela Pennington (she/they) is a PhD student in Technical Communication and Rhetoric at Texas Tech University whose research focuses on user experience, rhetoric of health and medicine, ethics, and the design of digital systems that shape people's access to information, healthcare, and social services. Their work is particularly concerned with how technical communicators can design and evaluate technologies in ways that account for structural inequities and the lived experiences of the people who use them. Their research draws on qualitative and mixed methods and is informed by patient experience design, design justice, feminist ethics of care, virtue ethics, user-centered research, and human-centered design frameworks.

Alongside their academic research, Pennington works as a content developer for the nonprofit Healthconnect Texas, serves as the website manager for the ACM Special Interest Group on Design of Communication (SIGDOC), and is the secretary for Texas Tech’s Raider Rhetoric Society.

Education

MA in Literature with Concentration in Writing Theory and Practice, University of Houston-Clear Lake, 2020

BA in Literature, University of Houston-Clear Lake, 2017 

Selected Publications

Pennington, A., Holmes, S., & Weston, J. (forthcoming). Naming and claiming the burdened virtues: Normative ethics for PXD research. Rhetoric of Health & Medicine.

Selected Conference Presentations

Ornelas, D., & Pennington, A. (2026, March 6). Queer user-ability and generative AI [Conference presentation]. Conference on College Composition and Communication, Cleveland, OH, United States.

Pennington, A., Adebayo, D. F., & Patel, M. (2026, April 18). Exploring activist and material tensions in design justice through AT & ANT theory [Online conference presentation]. Association of Teachers of Technical Writing Conference.