Research
Academic Book Project:
“Policing Blackness: How Intersectional Threat Shapes Black Politics”
In this project, Jackson examines the role of group threat in influencing young Black Americans’ political behavior. Specifically, they are concerned with how socialization with trauma, racial violence, and other threats shapes the daily perceptions of and responses to group threat and how those perceptions affect the political behavior of young Black Americans. Jackson’s work draws on critical race theory, Black Feminist theorizing and praxes, political psychology, and political behavior literature to foreground the ways that the threats associated with racial, gender, class, and sexual group membership uniquely shape the social and political lives and choices of young Black Americans.
Methodologically, Jackson utilizes quantitative analyses of nationally-representative survey data and experiments from both the GenForward Survey at the University of Chicago and the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Study housed at the University of California, Los Angeles. They also rely on an original collection of 100 in-depth interviews with young Black Americans ages 18 to 35 in Chicago, Syracuse, NYC, DC, Baltimore, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Boston, Houston, Los Angeles, and Oakland to investigate both intergroup and intragroup differences in responses to threat.
Jackson’s hypotheses especially focus on variations in threat responses from womxn and LGBTQI respondents when compared to other subordinated (racial minority) group members.
As such, Jackson finds that Black womxn are most likely to express concerns about threats like policing and intragroup violence.
Conversely, Black men vary drastically in their responses to group threat depending on their sexual orientation, gender expression, and vulnerability to stereotypes.
This work decenters white Americans’ experiences with threat and, instead, resituates the discipline to consider the various ways that power and position within multiple racial, gender, class, and sexual hierarchies shape responses to threat.
See my job market paper here: Jackson, Jenn M “Gendering Threat: Young People’s Perceptions of the Seriousness of Police Killings of Black Americans”, 2018
Trade Book/s:
Jackson, Jenn M. Black Women Taught Us, Penguin Random House, 2022
Peer-Reviewed:
(2018) “Black Americans and the ‘crime narrative’: comments on the use of news frames and their impacts on public opinion formation,” Politics, Groups, and Identities, 2018, DOI: 10.1080/21565503.2018.1553198
Jackson, Jenn M. (2019) “Breaking Out of the Ivory Tower: (Re)Thinking Inclusion of Women and Scholars of Color in the Academy,” Journal of Women, Politics, and Policy, 2019, DOI: 10.1080/1554477X.2019.1565459
Jackson, Jenn M. (2020) “Private Selves as Public Property: Black Women’s Self-Making in the Contemporary Moment” Public Culture, 2020, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-7816317
Under Review:
Jackson, Jenn M. “Intersectional Threat: How Race, Gender, and Sexuality Shape Black Americans’ Experiences with Policing” (under review)
Working Papers:
In addition to the above research, I have several working manuscripts.
Jackson, Jenn M. “Gendering Threat: An Analysis of Black Americans and Racial Threat” (in progress, accepted for submitted panel at 2019 meeting of MPSA)
Jackson, Jenn M. “Reaching Hardly-Reach Comrades: Using Intersectional Empathy in Qualitative Interviews” (in progress)
Jackson, Jenn M. “The Militancy of Memory: Collective Action, Kinship, and Disrupting White Ignorance” (in progress)
Jackson, Jenn M. “State of Emergency: Black Death and Life under the Neoliberal State” (in progress)
Book Chapters:
Jackson, Jenn M. “Black feminisms, queer feminisms, trans feminisms: Meditating on Pauli Murray, Shirley Chisholm, and Marsha P. Johnson against the erasure of history” (Routledge 2021).
Book Reviews:
Jackson, Jenn M. (2020) “Review: Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements, by Charlene A. Carruthers” National Review of Black Politics, 2020, 1 (1): 186–189. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/nrbp.2020.1.1.186
Jackson, Jenn M. (2020) “Review: Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, edited by Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith” National Review of Black Politics, 2020, 1 (2): 332–335. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/nrbp.2020.1.2.332
Jackson, Jenn M. (2018) “Black Lives Matter: Not a Moment, But a Movement” Black Perspectives, official blog of the African American Intellectual History Society, https://www.aaihs.org/black-lives-matter-not-a-moment-but-a-movement/