Lehua Ledbetter

  • Associate Professor
  • Professional and Public Writing
  • Email: lehua@uri.edu
  • Office Location: Roosevelt Hall, Rm 326

Biography

Lehua Ledbetter is an associate professor of professional and public writing at the University of Rhode Island. She received her PhD in Rhetoric and Writing at Michigan State University and joined the University of Rhode Island in 2014. Lehua is also a past co-editor of the Association of Teachers for Technical Writing Book Series and served as co-chair of the NCTE Asian/Asian American Caucus. Originally from the Big Island of Hawaiʻi, she now enjoys living in Providence, Rhode Island.

Research

Dr. Ledbetter’s research interests include environmental rhetorics, technical and professional communication, neurodivergence, disability and accessibility, and cultural rhetorics. Her work spans multiple disciplines, and she has published her research in numerous journals including Technical Communication Quarterly, the ACM Special Interest Group for the Design of Communication, and Communication Design Quarterly.

Education

Ph.D., Michigan State University, 2014
M.A., University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2010
B.A., University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2007

Selected Publications

Beyond policy: What plants and communities can teach us about sustainable changemaking. Co-authored with Alexandria Neelis. Communication Design Quarterly 11(3). 2023.

Tactical technical communication in communities. Co-authored with Avery Edenfield. SIGDOC: The 37th ACM International Conference on the Design of Communication Proceedings. 2019. https://doi.org/10.1145/3328020.3353927

The rhetorical work of YouTube’s beauty community: Relationship- and identity-building in user-created procedural discourse. Technical Communication Quarterly. Taylor and Franice. Vol. 27 No. 4. 2018. 9/5/25 DOI 10.1080/10572252.2018.1518950

Ledbetter, Lehua. With Jennifer Sano-Franchini and Robyn Tasaka. Hawai‘i’s ‘remix’ culture: Engaging postcolonialism and settler colonialism in discussions of copyright and intellectual property. Co-authored with Jennifer Sano-Franchini and Robyn Tasaka. Cultures of Copyright. Eds. Dànielle Nicole DeVoss and Martine Courant Rife. New York: Peter Lang Publishing Group, 2015