Skip to Content
Report an accessibility problem
Jennifer Clifton

Jennifer Clifton

Project Manager, Rob and Melani Walton Sustainability Solutions Service, Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory

jennifer.l.clifton@asu.edu

Rob and Melani Walton Sustainability Solutions Service
Arizona State University
PO Box 878604
Tempe, AZ 85287-8604

Titles

  • Project Manager, Rob and Melani Walton Sustainability Solutions Service, Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory

Biography

Jennifer Clifton is a Project Manager with the Rob and Melani Walton Sustainability Solutions Service. As a member of the RMWSSS Circular Living Lab team, she manages and supports community-oriented, public-facing collaborations and innovations in the sustainable development of an ethical Circular Economy—working regionally with partners to generate and support economic growth and technological development in ways that restore ecologies, transform economies, and sustain communities.

Her work focuses on theorizing collaborative methods for inquiry and deliberation in various ill-defined contexts. More specifically, her scholarship takes up the design of social practices of public life—public literacies—among diverse stakeholders in local communities putting public policy and scientific and technical expertise in conversation with people’s everyday experiences of risk, struggle, dignity and desire. To do this, she puts theories and rhetorics of public life, deliberative arts, and situated action to work, often in contexts where globalization and transnational movement complicate the conditions and consequences of engagement in public life. Importantly, writing—and learning to put writing to new purposes—typically infuses such situated action.

Central to this work is the question of what people do with deep differences and disjunctures as they are trying to construct something shared, distributed, contingent and contested. Her two books—both with Routledge, 2017—take up this question, theorizing dialogue across difference: one taking up the multiplicity of a self in dialogue; the other, argument in public life. Her second book—Argument as Dialogue Across Difference: Engaging Youth in Public Literacies—was nominated for the Conference on Community Writing’s 2017 Outstanding Book Award. A third book, The Potentiality of Difference: Singular Rhythms of a Generative Humanities in Community Contexts, was published with Intermezzo in 2020. She is currently theorizing and testing frameworks and methods for the collaborative invention and sustenance of community-driven micro-factory worker cooperatives that support an ethical Circular Economy. 

Previous projects include:

  •  an NSF-funded National Research Traineeship grant Employing Model-Based Reasoning in Socioscientific Environments focused a) on the design of technologies to support model-based reasoning about the shared use of a transboundary aquifer and b) on developing and teaching interdisciplinary methodologies with a range of emergent researchers taking up wicked problems with diverse stakeholders;
  • intercultural collaboration with the Tigua of Ysleta del Sur Pueblo to re-design a National Park Service museum exhibit focusing on the concretization of the Rio Grande at the U.S-Mexico-Pueblo border as a multi-national site of public memory.

Prior to coming to ASU, she was faculty and program director of Rhetoric and Writing Studies at the University of Texas at El Paso and, before that, faculty and director of the Missouri Writing Project at the University of Missouri.

Education

  • PhD, Curriculutm and Instruction (English Education), Arizona State University, 2012
  • MA, Professional Writing (Composition and Rhetoric), Kennesaw State University, 2008
  • BS, Communication, Kennesaw State University, 1999

External Links