Research
Academic Book Project:
“Policing Blackness: The Political Stakes of Racial Trauma”
In this project, Jackson asks “how do young Black Americans experience and respond to racial threat in their day-to-day lives?” Specifically, they are concerned with how repeated unwanted and involuntary contact with police socializes young Black Americans to viewing policing and police as more than just a threat, but as a source of communal trauma. As such, they argue, these persistent negative interactions with police are spawning a new generation of abolitionists whose direct and indirect contact with police and policing acts as a form of political socialization.
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 relies on both quantitative and qualitative research methods. Central to this work are 100 in-depth interviews Jackson conducted with young Black Americans ages 18 to 35 in Chicago, Syracuse, NYC, DC, Baltimore, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Boston, Houston, Los Angeles, and Oakland between 2018 and 2022. These interviews are rich and layered, providing context to the types of interactions that most deeply shape the political trajectories of young Black people.
To support this interview data, Jackson also 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.
Jackson’s hypotheses especially focus on variations in threat responses from women and LGBTQIA+ respondents when compared to other subordinated (racial minority) group members.
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
Peer-Reviewed:
Jackson, Jenn M, “The Militancy of (Black) Memory: Theorizing Black-Led Movements as Disjunctures in the Normativity of White Ignorance,” South Atlantic Quarterly 1 July 2022; 121 (3): 477–489. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-9825933.
Moffett-Bateau, Alex and Jenn M. Jackson. “Moving beyond Niceness: Reading bell hooks into the Radical Potential for the Discipline,” Journal of Women, Politics & Policy, 43:3, 409-416, DOI: 10.1080/1554477X.2022.2075681.
Jackson, Jenn M., and Melina Juárez Pérez. “Reclaiming Our Time and Labor: Contesting and Reframing Productivity Narratives in Political Science.” PS: Political Science & Politics 55, no. 2 (2022): 380–84. DOI: 10.1017/S1049096521001839.
Jackson, Jenn M., Juárez Pérez, Melina., Jamil Scott, & Diane Wong. (2022). Introduction to A Dialogue on the Status of Junior Women of Color in the Discipline. PS: Political Science & Politics, 55(2), 361-363. DOI: 10.1017/S1049096521001852.
Davies, Elizabeth Jordie, Jenn M. Jackson, and Shea Streeter. “Bringing abolition in: Addressing carceral logics in social science research.” Social Science Quarterly 102, no. 7 (2021): 3095-3102. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/ssqu.13022
Jackson, Jenn M., Brian Shoup, and H. Howell Williams. “Why Civically Engaged Research? Understanding and Unpacking Researcher Motivations.” PS: Political Science & Politics 54, no. 4 (2021): 721–24. DOI: 10.1017/S1049096521000822.
Adams, Carris, Danny Giles, Jenn M. Jackson, and Jared Richardson. “For White Folks who Have Considered Terror, When Privilege was Enuf: The Thrills of the White Gaze.” Portable Gray 3, no. 2 (2020): 181-188. DOI: 10.1086/711988.
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
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
(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
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. “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” in Black Women’s Cultural Histories: Across the Diaspora, From Ancient Times to the Present, (Routledge, 2021)
Jackson, Jenn M. “Breaking Out of the Ivory Tower: (Re)Thinking Inclusion of Women and Scholars of Color in the Academy” in Me Too Political Science, (Routledge, 2021) – reprint
Jackson, Jenn M. and Hilary Tackie [equal contribution]. “We Are How We Teach: Black Feminist Pedagogy as a Move Towards the Legibility and Liberation of All” in Critical Pedagogical Strategies to Transcend Hegemonic Masculinity (Peter Lang, 2021)
Jackson, Jenn M. “They Wanna Be Saved”: Black and Queer Women as Saviors and Superheroes in Higher Learning” in Higher Learning and Social Inequality in the Early Twenty-First Century: Why A 1990s Movie Matters for America Today, (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming)
Book Reviews:
Review of Abolition. Feminism. Now, by Angela Davis, Gina Dent, Erica Meiners, and Beth Richie, 2022, Signs Journal Short Takes, http://signsjournal.org/davis-dent-meiners-richie/.
Review of Political Mourning, by Heather Pool, Political Science Quarterly, 2022, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/polq.13370.
Review of The Anger Gap, by David Phoenix, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2021, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01419870.2021.1918343?journalCode=rers20.
Review of Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the 21st Century, by Barbara Ransby, Black Perspectives, See: https://www.aaihs.org/black-lives-matter-not-a-moment-but-a-movement/.
Review of Stay Woke: A People’s Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter, by Tehama Lopez Bunyasi and Candis Watts Smith, Perspectives on Politics 18 (2), 617-618. DOI: 10.1017/S1537592720000171.
Review of Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, edited by Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith, National Review of Black Politics 1 (2), 332-335. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/nrbp.2020.1.2.332.
Review of Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements, by Charlene A. Carruthers, National Review of Black Politics 1 (1), 186-189. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/nrbp.2020.1.1.186.