Jenn M. Jackson, Ph.D.
drjennmjackson@gmail.com
Assistant Professor
Syracuse University
Year of PhD: 2019
Phone: 2136753461
Address: 100 Eggers Hall, Office 320
City: Syracuse, New York - 13244
Country: United States
About Me:
Jenn M. Jackson (they/them) is an Assistant Professor at Syracuse University in the Department of Political Science as of August 2019.In June 2019, they received their doctoral degree in Political Science from the University of Chicago where they also received a graduate certificate in Gender and Sexuality Studies. Jenn’s research is in Black Politics with a focus on group threat, gender and sexuality, social movements, political psychology, and behavior. Jackson’s forthcoming book, Policing Blackness, investigates the role of racial group threat in influencing young Black Americans’ political behavior. Methodologically, they utilize quantitative analyses of nationally-representative survey data as well as qualitative analysis of 100 in-depth interviews with young Black Americans ages 18 to 35 across 11 U.S. cities to investigate both intergroup and intragroup differences in responses to and ideas about racial group threat. They find that Black women are most likely to express concerns about state-based and intragroup threat. Conversely, Black men vary drastically in their responses to group threat depending on their sexual orientation, gender expression, and vulnerability to stereotypes.
Research Interests
Race, Ethnicity and Politics
Gender and Politics
Public Opinion
Political Behavior
Policing
Racial Threat
Countries of Interest
United States
My Research:
Book Project: “Policing Blackness: The Political Stakes of Intersectional Threat.” 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 police 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.This book is under contract with University of Chicago Press, expected in 2025.
Publications:
Journal Articles:
We consider two local reparations cases—the Evanston Restorative Housing Program and Chicago reparations for police torture survivors. We argue that the programs are shaped by the differing political opportunities, the local context, and the social location of their advocates given that one was constructed within government systems in Evanston and the other largely by grassroots organizers in Chicago. Furthermore, both programs are criticized to varying degrees as being exclusive in their design and implementation. We term this exclusion a process of deliberative marginalization, whereby some of the most vulnerable and most directly affected beneficiaries of a redress initiative are left out of deliberations and implementation decisions about the initiative’s design. Subsequently, this study shows both the promise and constraints of reparations policy at the level of local government.
In August 2020, prominent race scholar and thinker on anti-racism Ibram X. Kendi wrote an article in the Atlantic titled, “Is This the Beginning of the End of American Racism?” The subtitle read: “Donald Trump has revealed the depths of the country’s prejudice—and has inadvertently forced a reckoning.” Kendi’s words, though likely meant to be a rhetorical device, are one of many examples of the ways that white people’s discovery of racism, anti-Blackness, and, perhaps, Blackness, in general, is often valorized as an indicator of progress toward the democratic ideals so many believe to belie American society and culture. But what does the centering of white discovery mean for Black memory? What does white ignorance demand of Black people? How are Black Americans transcending dominator logics that often hold captive both memory and history-making power? Through a synthesis of Nietzsche’s conception of …
Since the post-bellum era, Black civil rights figures of all stripes have emerged from communities around the United States to draw awareness toward the myriad social issues facing Black Americans. While many of those most recognizable figures were cisgender, heterosexual men, many others who were fundamental in quilting political organizations, rallying community resources for mass action, and sustaining intra-racial morale and solidarity through ongoing racist traumas were not. In particular, gender nonconforming legal scholar and activist Pauli Murray, presidential candidate Shirley Chisholm, and gay and trans rights activist Marsha P. Johnson were integral in radically rethinking justice in the United States. However, they are rarely acknowledged as such. In this chapter, I ask: how does the erasure of unrespectable, queer, gender nonconforming, and trans women and non-men shape our notion of …
Objective In this essay, we review and offer theoretical groundings and empirical approaches to the study of abolition. Methods We begin by demonstrating the ways police and prisons have been used to exploit and dominate marginalized people and argue that abolition offers a path to finding solutions to public safety and racial justice. We draw from black feminist and abolitionist political thought to show how abolition makes space to upend systems of power and domination and develop systems that address the root causes of violence. Results We assert that abolitionist research will not only focus on activists’ calls for dismantling the police but will also recognize and engage with activists’ proposals for reimagining public safety. We suggest that social scientists who study abolition, American uprisings, and policing must understand the differences between transformative changes based in abolitionist …
Civically engaged research (CER) lends itself well to researchers motivated by a desire to address inequality through what Norton (2004, 68) called “problem-oriented political science.” Despite its methodological diversity, CER seeks to solve social problems by engaging community partners. The participants at the American Political Science Association’s Institute of Civically Engaged Research in June 2019 shared this vision, and it provides a through line across the contributions to this symposium. Surveying examples of quality CER reveals a number of shared motivations that inspire researchers to undertake engaged research. Although we appreciate the “big tent” approach to CER (see Dobbs, Udani, Bullock, Hess, and Bullock and Hess in this symposium), our review identifies work that explicitly collaborates with vulnerable groups to build agency and improve political efficacy. In highlighting the importance of …
The American imperial project exploits race, class, gender, and sexual differences in the name of the state. But in what ways has the transformative nature of American imperialism intervened in the public and private lives of Black women? This essay asks, What impact has the American imperial project had on Black women’s self-making throughout the twentieth century? The author draws on the autobiographical works of Black enslaved, postbellum, queer, and transgender contemporaries to show how Black women have resisted the fungibility of their bodies through processes of self-formation and self-reclamation. The author also relies on the theoretical works of critical race, queer, and feminist scholars to frame how that resistance—whether in the form of sexual freedom, reproductive choice, or independence from traditional systems of labor—represents a critical site of possibility for understanding Black women’s social and political life worlds today.
In this #MeToo moment, many women of color have called out those in power, namely men, who engage in sexual harassment and toxic masculinity. Furthermore, scholars, whose personal identities and research interests lie at the margins of gender, race, class, and sexuality, have drawn increasing attention to issues of gendered and racialized biases and harassment in the Academy. During our pre-conference session at the 2018 meeting of the American Political Science Association, we discussed substantive methods for reckoning with these conditions. We worked through the theoretical frameworks of Black Feminist and queer scholarship to orient ourselves toward actions that center the most marginalized. We identified methods for generating transformative solutions to campus and departmental problems facing students, faculty, and staff with intersectional identities. In all, the workshop proved both effective and generative for all in attendance, providing those present with concrete tools to build more equitable departments and classrooms.
News framing choices remain critical components in the formation of political attitudes and public opinion. Early findings, which indicated that episodic framing of national issues like poverty and unemployment informed public opinion about minority group members, asserted that these framing choices often resulted in the attribution of societal ills to individuals rather than society at-large. Moving this analytical framework into the twenty-first century, I engage with literature on racial messaging to show that shifting social norms surrounding implicit versus explicit racism have transformed the ways that news frames function in mass media. As such, this essay examines the canonical theory of news frames as falling along a thematic-episodic continuum. Fundamentally, I argue that implicit and explicit racial messaging in news media coverage of crime could change the way viewers form opinions of Black Americans and criminality. Thus, it is critical to revisit longstanding theories of news frames to accommodate the present political moment.
Media Appearances:
TV Appearances:
Jenn Jackson, Political Science Professor at Syracuse University, discusses the key takeaways from President Biden's news conference Thursday night at the NATO Summit, and states that the conference didn't change anyone's mind. Professor Jackson speaks with Kailey Leinz and Joe Mathieu on Bloomberg's "Balance of Power." (Source: Bloomberg)
Syracuse University Political Science Professor Jenn Jackson sheds light on what young people are watching for in the presidential debate. (Source: Bloomberg)
In 2019, Syracuse University students staged a sit-in on campus that developed into a movement. In this news story, Professor Jenn M Jackson details the outcomes of that protest and how the campus environment has been shaped by student resistance.
Police reform is back in the national conversation in the wake of Tyre Nichols’ death after being arrested by Memphis Police. And while several cities, like Camden, NJ, have had some success with reform, some advocates say it’s not enough. So it’s time to ask an uncomfortable question: do we need to go beyond reform and "abolish" the police? NYT Opinion Writer Jane Coaston and Syracuse Political Science Professor Jenn M. Jackson join Mehdi to discuss.
We hear from two members of the black community as a Cook County judge orders the release of dashboard video footage of the fatal police shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. The City Council has already approved a payment of $5 million to McDonald's family, but the family says it would be too painful for them if the video were to be released and is against making it public. Others argue that, in the interests of transparency and police accountability, the public should see what transpired when a police officer shot McDonald 16 times. Joining "Chicago Tonight" in the discussion are Jenn Jackson, a doctoral student at University of Chicago where she's studying political science, co-creator of the award-winning web magazine Water Cooler Convos, founder and CEO of The Worth Campaign and managing editor of the Black Youth Project; and Jauwan Hall, a senior political science major at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a U.S. Marine veteran who served two tours of duty in Iraq and a tour in Afghanistan.