Jen Clifton

Jennifer Clifton is Assistant Director, Community Economic Development with the Walton Sustainability Solutions Service. As a member of the Community Eco Economic Development (CEED) team, she builds, designs, leads 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.

She is co-PI and project lead on an $5 million USDA Forest Service, Urban and Community Forestry award for Urban Nature (formerly Greater Phoenix Urban Forestry Accelerator), collaborating with 18 community, municipal, and industry partners to equitably expand the tree and shade canopy in neighborhoods most vulnerable to the impacts of extreme heat and, through community-industry partnerships, to develop a thriving urban forestry industry in metro Phoenix. As a Justice-40 initiative, this urban forestry collaborative aims to grow and sustain urban forests as critical public health infrastructure and to build proven pathways for marginalized individuals to gain viable incomes and succeed in a robust urban forest industry. 

Urban Nature reflects her ongoing commitment to critical collaborative and participatory methods for inquiry, deliberation, and action 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-industry-university partnerships that support an Urban Nature Nursery, Community Trade School and Enterprise Hub to bring all of the health, environmental, and economic benefits of urban forestry to metro Phoenix communities and neighborhoods most impacted by extreme heat. 

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;
• an 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.