Jordan Woodward
Jordan Woodward is from a small town in Oklahoma within the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, at the point where the Ozark foothills meet the Great Plains. Growing up in a state marked by the boom and bust of extractive industry, Woodward has a particular interest in the relationships between place, community, and industry, as well as between storytelling and technical and professional communication. She has a PhD in English (Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy) from The Ohio State University.
Recently, Woodward has written about a network of organizations in the Little Cities of Black Diamonds (LCBD) microregion of Appalachian Ohio who are working to transition their economy from extractive industry to eco-heritage tourism. In this project, Woodward argues that technical communication acts as an essential element in crafting shared narratives of place/environment, history, and community that circulate from the underground work of coalitional networks into the public sphere. Her broader research questions include: How do diverse stakeholders negotiate a shared, though sometimes conflicting, interest in place? How do different generations approach place-making? What role do technical and professional communication and storytelling play in place-making efforts? What is at stake in place-making efforts in rural areas that have a history of resource extraction?
During her time as a postdoctoral research associate at the Humanities Research Institute, Woodward continues her work with Appalachian communities while working to establish meaningful partnerships with coal-reliant communities in Illinois. Rooted in the shared history of Illinois’s and Ohio's extractive industries, her project responds to the contemporary challenges faced by coal-reliant communities during times of industrial, economic, environmental, and community transitions. Specifically, the project involves documenting storytelling practices and communication artifacts around these transitions from a variety of stakeholders and facilitating knowledge transfer across communities in the broader Ohio River Valley who are experiencing similar transitions.
