Jenn M. Jackson

Jenn M. Jackson (they/them) is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science. Jackson also holds faculty affiliations in African American studies, women’s and gender studies and LGBT studies, and is a senior research associate at the Campbell Public Affairs Institute.

Jackson's primary research is in Black politics with a focus on racial threat and trauma, gender and sexuality, political behavior, and social movements.

Jackson’s first academic book project "Policing Blackness" (University of Chicago Press, 2023) investigates the role of group threat in influencing Black Americans’ political behavior. Methodologically, they utilize quantitative analyses of survey data and experiments as well as qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews with young Black Americans ages 18 to 35 to investigate both intergroup and intragroup differences in responses to and ideas about group threat. Jackson finds that Black women are most likely to express concerns about state-based and intragroup threat. Comparatively, Black men vary drastically in their responses to group threat depending on their sexual orientation, gender expression, and vulnerability to stereotypes.

Jackson is the author of the forthcoming book "Black Women Taught Us" (Random House Press, 2023). The book is an intellectual and political history of Black women’s activism, movement organizing and philosophical work that explores how women from Harriet Jacobs to Audre Lorde to the members of the Combahee River Collective, among others, have for centuries taught us how to fight for justice and radically reimagine a more just world for us all.

Jackson received a doctoral degree from the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago where they also received a graduate certificate in gender and sexuality studies. Jackson earned a B.S. in industrial engineering from the University of Southern California with a minor in sociology, and went on to earn an M.A. with honors in political science from California State University, Fullerton, where they later taught Political Science Research Methods and Black Politics. 

Book Project: “Race, Risks, and Responses: Mapping Black Americans’ Reactions to Policing in the US”

In this project, Jackson is concerned with how racial socialization shapes daily perceptions of police/ing, how responses to the threat of policing vary uniquely by race, gender, class and embodiment, and how those perceptions affect the political behavior of young Black Americans. This work draws on critical race theory, political psychology and political behavior literature to foreground the ways that the threats associated with group membership uniquely shape the social and political lives and choices of young Black Americans.

Methodologically, Jackson utilizes quantitative analyses of survey data and experiments as well as qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews with young Black Americans ages 18 to 35 across cities like Chicago, New York City, Atlanta, D.C./Baltimore, Oakland, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Boston to investigate both intergroup and intragroup differences in responses to threat.

Selected Research Grants

Appleby-Mosher Fund for Faculty Research, Syracuse University, 2023 (PI: Jenn M. Jackson) $1,500

APSA Centennial Grant, “Building an Academic Pipeline” for Jr. WOC in Political Science, 2020 – 2022 (co-PIs: Melina Juarez, Danielle Lemi, and Diane Wong) $25,000

APSA Diversity and Inclusion Advancing Research Grant for Early Career Scholars, “What was Promised, What is Owed: A New Generation Makes the Case for Reparations”, 2021 (co-PIs: Jordie Davies and David Knight) $2,500

Tenth Decade Project Grant, Maxwell School, Syracuse University, “Race, Risks, and Responses” policing and threat survey research, 2020-2021 (PI: Jenn M. Jackson) $20,000

Appleby-Mosher Fund for Faculty Research, Syracuse University, 2020 (PI: Jenn M. Jackson) $1,125

CUSE Seed Grant, Syracuse University, “Race, Risks, and Responses” policing and threat interview field work, 2020 – 2022 (PI: Jenn M. Jackson) $5,000

Book: "Policing Blackness" 

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, D.C., 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.

Peer-Reviewed Publications:

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. "Private Selves as Public Property: Black Women’s Self-Making in the Contemporary Moment," Public Culture, 1 January 2020; 32 (1): 107–131. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-7816317.

Jackson, Jenn M. “Breaking Out of the Ivory Tower: (Re)Thinking Inclusion of Women and Scholars of Color in the Academy,” Journal of Women, Politics, and Policy, 40:1, 195-203, DOI: 10.1080/1554477X.2019.1565459.

Jackson, Jenn M. “Black Americans and the ‘Crime Narrative’: Comments on the use of news frames and their impacts on public opinion formation,” Politics, Groups, and Identities, 7:1, 231-241, DOI: 10.1080/21565503.2018.1553198.

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 21^st 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.

Working Papers:

Jackson, Jenn M, “Intersectional Threat: How Race, Gender, and Sexuality Shape Black Americans’ Perspectives on Policing.” (under review)

Jackson, Jenn M, “Reaching Hardly-Reached Comrades: Using Intersectional Empathy in Qualitative Interviews.” (under review)

Jackson, Jenn M, “State of Emergency: Black Life and Death under the Neoliberal State.” (under review)

Davies, Elizabeth Jordie, Jenn M. Jackson, and David Knight, “Young Adults’ Perceptions of the Racial Order and the Politics of Racial Redress.” Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association in Chicago, IL, March 2017. Accepted in the RSF: The Russell Sage Journal of the Social Sciences on “Black Reparations: Insights from the Social Sciences.”

Davies, Elizabeth Jordie, Jenn M. Jackson, and Bocar Ba, “Funding Communities to Defund Police: Police, Nonprofits, and Reducing Community Violence.” Presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association in Montreal, Quebec, September 2022.