Kelly Jensen
Assistant Professor, Ad Hoc Program Specialist

Kelly Jensen (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Wisconsin Whitewater at Rock County. She grounds her teaching in the belief that effective communication is a crucial ingredient to student success. Her courses hone students' ability to scrutinize how critical analysis of multiple perspectives, self-awareness, and context inform the ways we analyze and interpret communication. Her overall hope is that students develop the ability to think critically about the communication they encounter and become conscious about the communication they send out into the world. Broadly, her research pursues questions related to education, identity, and advocacy. Her scholarship critically examines how unequal systems of privilege influence public discourses around K12 education.


Education

• Ph.D. Communication Arts (Rhetoric), University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2023
• M.A. Communication Arts (Rhetoric), University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2019
• M.A. Curriculum & Instruction, University of Colorado-Denver, 2012
• B.A., Communication Studies, Gustavus Adolphus College, 2010

Selected Publications

• "'Choose Your Level of Diversity': Troubling Progressive White Parents' School Choice Discourse," Rhetoric & Public Affairs 27, no. 3 (2024): 1-30.  
• “‘Our Pain Makes Us Family’: March For Our Lives and the Constitutive Role of Gun Violence Trauma in Youth Publics,” Communication and the Public 8, no. 4 (2023): 294-307.
• “Localized Ideographs in Education Rhetoric: Polly Williams and a Justice-Driven Ideology of Choice,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 107, no. 3 (2021): 305-327.
  

Courses

• CTA 101- Introduction to Interpersonal Communication
• CTA 103- Introduction to Public Speaking
• CTA 200- Introduction to Digital Communication
• CTA 210- Introduction to Intercultural Communication
• CTA 218- Popular Culture in the Media 
• CTA 368- Theory and Practice of Persuasion