Social Justice Commons^™

What Do People Experiencing Homelessness Need?, Marisa Zapata

Homelessness Research & Action Collaborative Publications and Presentations

This is an opinion piece about a survey in Portland that reveals profound racial disparities even in basic answers about where people sleep.

Scholar-Practitioners Of Color Challenge Normative Stem-M Practices Through Cultural Intuition And Student Narratives/Voices, Maria Reyes, Janet Rocha, Tamara Coronella, Lindsay Romasanta

Global Diversity and Inclusion Publications and Presentations

This symposium features four scholar-practitioners of color working across the STEM-Medicine (STEM-M) pipeline who are actively engaging their cultural intuition (Delgado Bernal, 1998) to create access to higher education by challenging dominant pathways, practices, and cultures related to college readiness/preparedness, success, persistence, and the workforce transition.

Session Objectives

• Challenge systemic barriers in diverse educational settings, such as deficit-frameworks and their associated normative practices
• Promote asset-based approaches and frameworks to achieve better equity, access, and opportunity for students of color in STEM-M pathways in K-16 settings
• Facilitate discussion with the audience on how they can replicate a similar approach of change …

We Are Brave: Expanding Reproductive Justice Discourse Through Embodied Rhetoric And Civic Practice, Roberta Hunte, Catherine Ming T’Ien Duffly

School of Social Work Faculty Publications and Presentations

In this article, we share the example of our recent community-based performance project on reproductive justice, We are BRAVE, to serve as a model of how community-based performance can be an embodied strategy for social change. We draw from the work of scholars of feminist rhetoric, community-based performance, and reproductive justice. In sharing the example of We are BRAVE, we show how using communitycentered, performative storytelling as embodied rhetoric can be an effective mode of public and political persuasion.

Greening Inequality: How Urban Sustainable Development Fails Under Neoliberalism, Josie R. Allison

University Honors Theses

Despite its banner of common-good altruism, urban sustainable development becomes a branding scheme for municipalities when it operates under and prioritizes a neoliberal agenda. Neoliberalism is the dominant economic philosophy within the United States, and other western economies, that emphasizes extreme economic liberalism and open markets with public fiscal austerity and the diminished role of governments. This has transferred a great portion of power and funding once held by the public sector into the hands of the private sector. Under neoliberalism, city governments function with stripped federal funding and limited budgets, while leaning on private companies for public operations, like …

Black Freedom Beyond Borders: Memories Of Abolition Day, Amber Butts, Ayize Jama-Everett, Calvin Williams, Donte Clark, Lisa Bates, Naudika Williams, Shawn Taylor, Walidah Imarisha, Amir Kadar

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Publications and Presentations

The anthology is available here for download, and the YouTube video of authors reading excerpts is embedded.

Wakanda Dream Lab and PolicyLink present a storyworld of safety and freedom in a future without prisons and policing.

While debates about “defunding” raise the question of what a new public safety system might look like, authors and artists are showing us what is possible through speculative fiction. In the spirit of visionary fiction, we convened future-bending Black storytellers for a Black Speculative Writer's Room Project, and together, we created an anthology of freedom dream stories exploring a world after the abolition of …

Cultural Resource Centers Black Lives Matter Statement, Cultural Resource Centers Team

Cultural Resource Centers Reports and Resources

The official statement from the Cultural Resource Centers affirming their support for the Black Lives Matter movement and racial justice.

What Makes Inclusion Work: An Autoethnography On Coordinating An Inclusive Youth Advocacy Program, Megan Price

University Honors Theses

In this autoethnographic thesis, I analyze my observations as the co-coordinator of an inclusive youth advocacy program (YAP) to detail what made inclusion successful, and what was ineffective. I had the unique position of facilitating conversations and workshops around social justice issues and how to advocate using self-expression and art. In this thesis, I will reflect on the Inclusive Education Conference (IEC) in Spring of 2019, and the Summer Summit in the summer of 2019, both in Portland, Oregon. At the IEC some of the observations noted as harmful to inclusion included: people wanting to silence the youth, inclusion being …

Racial Justice Is Climate Justice: Racial Capitalism And The Fossil Economy, Julius Mcgee, Patrick Trent Greiner

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Publications and Presentations

The narrative of oppression moves through dialectical pressures. Capitalism evolved from the feudal order that preceded it, creating new forms of racial oppression that benefited an emerging ruling class [1]. Racial tensions evolve alongside economic oppression that subjugates labor to capital. The preceding racial order molds to emerging mechanisms of expropriation and exploitation by way of force and resistance. Beneath the surface of these tensions lies the interconnected threads of ecological and human expropriation. At the heart of all oppression, lies the manipulation of reproduction. The social processes necessary to reproduce black and brown communities, the ecological processes necessary to …

The Middle East, North Africa, South Asia (Menasa) Initiative: Spring 2020 Newsletter, Ahmed El Mansouri, Menasa Initiative Team

Cultural Resource Centers Reports and Resources

Spring 2020 Newsletter for The Middle East, North Africa, South Asia (Menasa) Initiative at Portland State University. Features include MENASA highlights, visiting speakers, and upcoming events.

How Long Can Neoliberalism Withstand Climate Crisis?, Julius Mcgee, Patrick Greiner

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Publications and Presentations

The climate crisis is proving to be antithetical to the neoliberal machines that define current forms of social organization. On the one hand, reducing fossil fuel consumption, the largest contributor to climate change, requires collaborative efforts. These efforts must take into consideration the foundational role of fossil fuels in modern economies. We must acknowledge, for instance, that most peoples’ livelihoods are tethered to fossil fuels, which recent studies have demonstrated is not the result of random historical development but deliberate policy.1 Fossil fuels continue to be used as a form of social domination—a means to expropriate productive and reproductive …

How Oregon’S Racist History Can Sharpen Our Sense Of Justice Right Now, Walidah Imarisha

Black Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

Writer Walidah Imarisha on eight years of talking about the brutal history of race in Oregon.

Name a small town in Oregon. I have most likely been there, talking about race.

For the past eight years, starting as part of Oregon Humanities’ Conversation Project, I’ve stood in front of thousands of attendees in packed libraries, community centers, senior homes, college campuses, and prisons.

I’ve seen it all: multiple people arguing the Ku Klux Klan was and remains a “civic organization,” chiding me for focusing solely on the “negatives” while adamantly denying they support racism or are themselves racist. I’ve received …

Centering Equity In Oregon’S 100 Year Water Vision: A Student-Led Policy Paper Prepared By The Oregon Water Stories Team At Portland State University, Clare T. Mcclellan, Sadie Boyers, Victoria Cali De Leon, Tony Cole, Laura Cowley-Martinson, Shersten Finley, Dustin Lanker, Julia Seydel, Aakash Nath Upraity, Janet Cowal, Melissa Haeffner

Environmental Science and Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

The purpose of this report is to provide evidence for the need to further intentionally incorporate equity into Oregon’s 100 Year Water Vision. Four case studies contextualize this need and highlight the variety of water issues throughout the state, supported by linguistic analyses of local newspapers. As Oregon policy-makers are responsible for ensuring working water systems for all Oregonians, we also suggest implementable criteria for the evaluation of equity in water issues and decision-making. This student-led and interdisciplinary report comes from the Haeffner-Cowal Oregon Water Stories research lab at Portland State University.

Interview With Judith Ramaley, Judith A. Ramaley, Liza Julene Schade

Conflict Resolution Oral Histories

Judith Ramaley was interviewed by Liza Schade on May 22, 2020, in Portland, Oregon. Also participating in the interview are Patricia Schechter and Cleophas Chambliss.

In this interview, Dr. Ramaley discusses the issues at the forefront of her presidency in the 1990s, lessons learned from strategizing severe budget cuts that followed the passage of Measure 5 in 1990, ideas behind the new University Studies curriculum, and diversifying student and faculty demographics and creating safer and more inclusive university spaces.

Albina Zone, Lisa Bates

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Publications and Presentations

Story Summary:
In near future Portland, the police have been abolished, but what else is needed for real liberation? A gifted young woman and her mother struggle to communicate across a rift of unspoken history.

Foreword to Black Freedom Beyond Borders: Memories of Abolition Day

There are times when our lived reality feels stranger than science fiction - a viral pandemic, an economic crisis, global conflicts on multiple frontlines, the rise of white supremacist racism, a wave of state violence against Black bodies, the fiery uprisings across the nation, and militarized guards deployed in response… It was the Red Summer …

Rememory, Walidah Imarisha

Black Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

Short Story Summary

Set in a future world where those who believe in liberation have set up autonomous zones across the United States, teen Ayo contemplates her place in this society without prisons and police. While her chosen sibling Essakai is fighting to free more territories, Ayo decides to journey into the Rememory, the collective consciousness of past Black liberation movements, to find out what her role in creating these new just worlds should be.

Foreword to Black Freedom Beyond Borders: Memories of Abolition Day

There are times when our lived reality feels stranger than science fiction - a viral …

Educación, Negritud Y Nación: Políticas De Inclusión Educativa Para Afrodescendientes En Ecuador, Ethan Johnson, John Antón

Black Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

La población afrodescendiente de América Latina y el Caribe representa el treinta por ciento del total de habitantes; sin embargo, la más elemental comparación expone significativas brechas que se reflejan en incidentes condiciones de exclusión y de pobreza, por falta de un acceso efectivo a servicios como educación, salud y empleo.

Educación, negritud y nación: políticas de inclusión educativa para afrodescendientes en Ecuador es un libro que parte de una investigación conjunta entre el IAEN y la Universidad de Portland. El estudio propone un enfoque que permite reconocer las diferencias y particularidades, para formular e implementar soluciones institucionales correspondientes con …

Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion Plan, Ann Curry-Stevens, Jasmin Hunter, Ebony Oldham, Stephen L. Percy, Cece Ridder, Kevin Thomas, Mark Wubbold, Marisa Zapata

Global Diversity and Inclusion Publications and Presentations

Portland State University is situated in the heart of downtown Portland, Multnomah County, Oregon. Multnomah County rests on traditional village sites of the Multnomah, Kathlamet, Clackamas, Bands of Chinook, Tualatin Kalapuya, Molalla and many other Tribes who made their homes along the Columbia River. Multnomah is a band of Chinooks that lived in this area. Portland State University wishes to recognize that since time immemorial these have been the lands of the Indigenous peoples of this region.

Since its inception as Vanport Extension Center (VEC) in 1946, the institution now known as Portland State University has provided a rich learning …

Survey On Needs Of People Living Unsheltered, Marisa Zapata, Homelessness Research & Action Collaborative, Joint Office Of Homeless Services, Shannon Singleton, Street Roots

Homelessness Research & Action Collaborative Publications and Presentations

Portland State University’s Homelessness Research & Action Collaborative worked with the Joint Office of Homeless Services, Shannon Singleton, and Street Roots to survey people who are living unsheltered to better understand their needs. Because of the racial disparities that we know exist, we set out to create and administrate a survey that would also ask these questions with a focus on people of color.

In all, 383 people took the rapidly deployed and quickly crafted survey over the course of two weeks. Nearly 40% of those surveyed identified as people of color with the highest representation among Black people and …