From examining portrayals of refugees in literature to measuring the effects of Portland’s public defender crisis on people of color, PSU faculty are breaking new ground in research projects related to racial justice and equity. 

While outside funding for this type of research is often lacking, last year the PSU Foundation directed an estate gift from alumna Emily Zell '72 to set up a dedicated fund. The Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Research (JEDI-R) Scholars Fund supports creative and innovative projects that are centered on race, racial justice, equity and intersectionality.

“Knowing how vitally important that work is—whether it's in education, social work or other fields—and inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, we wanted to provide focused funding for projects that needed relatively small levels of support to make really big impacts,” says Jason Podrabsky, Interim Vice President for Research & Graduate Studies. “Research is one of the most important ways PSU fulfills its mission to serve the city, and it's one of the best ways we're fulfilling our commitment to advance justice, equity, diversity and inclusion.”

The results of the research projects will shine a light on everything from how GenZ and millennials of color consume media to Indigenous tropes in horror movies to what Black folks really think about Portland’s progressive reputation.

The fund is administered by Research & Graduate Studies who established the JEDI-R program with input from the Office of Global Diversity and Inclusion and the Office of Academic Affairs. The PSU Foundation provided funds for the program through the estate gift from Zell, who passed away in 2019 at the young age of 70 at her home in Oakland, Calif. After receiving her teaching credentials from Portland State University, Zell relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area and took a job with Wildwood Elementary School in Piedmont. Her estate supports the Emily Zell Endowed Scholarship along with the JEDI fund.

As of now, the JEDI-R Scholars program is a one time opportunity, but Podrabsky hopes to find a way to continue the initiative. 

Last spring, the Fund awarded grants to 12 research projects. The grants ranged from $5,000 to $15,000 for a total of just under $130,000. For some faculty, funding will help them finish or expand an existing project. Other grants are supporting new work. The grants are supporting scholars in a range of different disciplines, including English, Indigenous Nation Studies, sociology, criminal justice, urban studies and social work. 

Some JEDI-R projects are just beginning while others are nearing completion. Three of these projects are highlighted below.

GenZ & Millennials: Immersive Media and Books 2022

For their JEDI-R project, Kathi Inman Berens, associate professor of book publishing and digital humanities, and Rachel Noorda, director of book publishing and associate professor of English, have been studying the most misunderstood group of book consumers: GenZ and millennial readers. 

This project builds on a study the pair completed in 2020 that discovered Black and Latinx GenZ and millennials out-consume the general public when it comes to reading.

“The most avid readers were young BIPOC folks,” says Noorda. “And that has not been the demographic the industry has really tried to serve in the past.”

JEDI-R funding supported Noorda and Berens’ follow-up study: a deeper dive on GenZ and millennials. As part of the study, participants were surveyed and asked whether they identify as a reader, gamer, writer and/or podcaster, share how they discover new books, and how they access free books, including via the library and through online piracy. 

“We found that people who are pirating are also good customers, and that's one of the most surprising findings,” says Berens. “People who are pirating books are also engaging more in writing fan fiction. They're avid in online communities. They're avid gamers, and they are buying more books and subscribing to more magazines and newspapers than the general population.” 

The survey also found that BIPOC GenZ and millennials use digital library collections more than the general population. To Noorda and Berens, this finding has important implications for publishers when they make licensing deals with libraries.

“If this is how BIPOC GenZ and millennials are using the library, if digital collections matter to many of them, then this is an equity issue,” says Noorda. “As [publishers are] thinking about revisiting licensing terms for digital collections—ebooks and audiobooks—then that DEI lens should be something they consider.”

Berens and Noorda aim to disseminate their findings widely. They already presented their research at the American Library Association conference in Washington DC last June and the PageBreak publishing conference in October. They are in the process of publishing two 25-page reports for the American Library Association and have plans to publish additional reports in the future. 

The Savage Screen: Indigeneity in the Modern American Horror Film

For Kali Simmons, assistant professor of Indigenous Nations Studies, the JEDI-R Scholars Fund is helping her take spring term off from teaching so she can focus on writing her book, “The Savage Screen: Indigeneity in the Modern American Horror Film.” The book examines the representation of Indigenous people in contemporary American horror. 

“I'm focusing on settler representations of Native people because there isn’t a book that unpacks indigeneity and horror,” says Simmons. 

In particular, Simmons is focusing on four main tropes for ways Indigenous people are represented in modern horror films: the Ghost, the Killer, the Creature and the Absence. 

One idea that she is excited to further develop in the ‘Killer’ chapter of her book is about the Final Girl, a ubiquitous figure in modern horror movies. In the 1960s, horror movies began to feature female protagonists who undergo a series of horrible events but survive as ‘the Final Girl’ after the monster or killer has been defeated. Cinema scholars saw this as a new development, but Simmons sees it differently. 

“That’s actually not a really new form,” she says. Instead, Simmons argues that the Final Girl has been around since the 1600s, dating back to a best-selling novel, "A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson," about a woman held captive by the Wampanoag and Nipmuc peoples during King Philip’s war.

“It's this recounting of all these horrible things that she witnesses, but ultimately she survives and gets restored back to humanity,” says Simmons, making Rowlandson the original Final Girl.

Simmons notes that while the Final Girl seems like a feminist figure on the surface, often the monster in these movies is a stand-in for another marginalized identity, whether that is people of color, trans people or Indigenous people. As an example, she cites the 2015 film Bone Tomahawk, in which a white woman is kidnapped by troglodytes—a stand-in for Indigenous people—but ultimately survives.

“While the Final Girl is able to gain some power, it's ultimately a kind of white supremacist, patriarchal power, and I argue the same thing in the case of Mary Rowlandson,” says Simmons. “She was the first white Puritan woman that was allowed to speak and record what happened to her, and that was empowering, but the things that she got to say were ultimately things that were anti-Indigenous and that justified genocide of Indigenous peoples.”

In her chapter on the Killer trope, Simmons plans to dive into why racist tropes like the Final Girl persist in modern films. 

“I think part of the problem comes from these filmmakers genuinely in their heart of hearts wanting to say something nice about Indigenous peoples and to critique colonialism today,” says Simmons. “But they're redeploying these tropes without examining the unstated assumptions that structure these tropes. That’s really what the book is trying to unpack.”

One day, Simmons hopes her book can be used as a teaching tool for classes on Indigenous horror cinema.“I’d like for every school to have space for an Indigenous horror class or an Indigenous genre fiction class,” says Simmons.

Black Perceptions of Portland's Protests, People, and Progressive Politics

Shirley A. Jackson, professor of sociology, is using JEDI-R funding to examine Black experiences and perceptions of Portland’s 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. As a Black sociologist living in Portland who studies race, gender and social movements, Jackson is uniquely qualified to tackle this research project.  

“This was a project that I really became interested in doing after listening to so many news stories presenting the protests in what I thought was a very narrow way, especially after the protests started to move away from Black Lives Matter,” says Jackson.

Jackson is surveying and interviewing 50-75 Black individuals living in the Portland area about their perceptions of the protests and the progress that has—and has not—been made following them. She is making a point to include both native Oregonians and transplants in her study to see if there are differences in how these two groups experience race and racism in Portland, as well as Black people of different social classes, occupations and ages, including a group of people who were minors during the protests.  

Midway through her interviews, Jackson has already noticed some telling findings.

“There are Blacks who actually saw white privilege in those protests and thus it prevented Black people from actually feeling comfortable participating in the very protests that were about Black people,” says Jackson. “To me that is a really sad finding.”

In her interviews, Jackson includes questions about feelings of safety inside and outside of Portland, the Defund the Police movement that grew in popularity during the protests and the extent to which participants see Portland as progressive. 

“Portland tends to present itself as a very progressive city, and I wanted to know if Black respondents saw Portland in the same way,” she says.

One of her findings: Some study participants see Portland as a progressive city when it comes to gender and sexuality but not when it comes to race. 

“Blacks in the Portland metropolitan area tend to see discussions of race, especially as it relates to Blacks, as being more performative than perhaps whites understand,” says Jackson, noting that there is a perception that white people think that Portland is a wonderful place for Black people aside from the issues of gentrification and dealing with the police. There is also a tendency for whites to overestimate how many Black people actually interact with the police routinely.

“I find that to be actually quite disturbing because it's almost as though whites and their progressive ideologies are ignoring the fact that there are different types of Black people,” she says. Jackson contends that there is a level of stereotyping that distorts the myriad experiences of Black people. 

After her interviews and analyses are complete, Jackson plans to share her findings with both the Portland community and fellow academics. 

“I want my scholarship to certainly pique people's interest in doing research in different kinds of spaces, especially spaces where the populations and activities that may happen in one particular period of time serve as an opportunity to better understand that community,” she says. “That is definitely the case with the protests in 2020. There is a certain understanding that Black people have of Portland, and it became, I would say, magnified by the protests in 2020.”

Learn more about the JEDI-R Scholars Fund

Summaries of all the JEDI-R Scholar projects are available on the JEDI-R scholars project website. 

“Everyone at PSU should be really proud of the work our JEDI-R faculty are doing,” says Podrabsky.