Jordan Clarke Hayes

Jordan Clarke Hayes is a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Writing Program at NYU Shanghai. He is a teacher of English composition and a researcher working from a literacy studies perspective. He began his educational career as a literacy consultant for Lindamood-Bell Learning, a research-based organization working with children overcoming dyslexia and other learning challenges. Hayes has taught composition at Northeastern University, the University of Pittsburgh, San Francisco State University, and Foothill Community College. His teaching emphasizes student agency and the cultivation of knowledge about writing processes. Embracing the use of all available languages and digital tools as resources for inquiry and reflection, he brings a sociomaterial and translingual orientation to his student-centered classrooms.

As a literacy studies scholar, Dr. Hayes applies a sociomaterial concept of practice to a broad range of topics and questions including technology, language, infrastructure, identity, and mobility. His dissertation, Trajectories of Belonging, gathered a community of Syrian refugees’ stories of displacement, migration, and settlement in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. A longer-term project, (Im)Possible Homes, inquires into the experiences of displaced people who invest memory, money and expertise into building a house. After coming to China, Hayes co-designed Exploring Literacy, a community literacy project bringing Chinese undergraduates to a local kindergarten as tutor/researchers enacting a participant-observation methodology. 

Select Publications

• “Against Autonomous Literacies: Extending the Work of Brian V. Street, Editors’ Introduction.” Co-authored with Antonio Byrd and Nicole Turnipseed. Literacy in Composition Studies, special issue honoring Brian V. Street. February 2021.

• “Trajectories of Belonging & Enduring Technology: Digital Infrastructures, 2G Devices, and Syrian Refugees in the Kurdish Region of Iraq.” Media and Forced Migration, special issue, The European Journal of Communication. November 2019.

• “Upon the Walls of the UN Camp: Situated Intersectionality, Trajectories of Belonging, and Built Environment among Syrian Refugee Communities in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq." Making Faces: Art and Intersectionality in Iraqi Kurdistan, special issue, The Journal of Intersectionality. December 2018.

Education

• PhD,
  University of Pittsburgh

• MA, 
  San Francisco State University

• BA,
  Oberlin College

Research Interests

• Literacy Studies

• Sociomateriality

• Intersectionality

• Decoloniality

• Translingualism

• Qualitative Research Methods