Reimagining Community Safety Through Participatory Action Research
Understanding Multi-systems Impacts of Police, Policing, and Prison and Envisioning Ways to Transform Harm
Overview
The call for a policy shift that defunds police and prisons and reimagines community safety is a call for transformative work in systems that are deeply embedded in our modern society and culture. The research that supports this shift should investigate both what is and what could be; it should lift up the voices of those most directly and deeply affected by these systems; and it should invite the community to participate in learning and the development of plans for new systems of safety and care.
This project is led by Dr. Lisa Bates (PI) and supported by Imagine Black via the Reimagine Safety Fund (Northwest Health Foundation)
Understanding multi-systems impacts
This project seeks to understand how police and policing and prisons and punishment affect our people across multiple systems of well-being—health, housing, education, work—and at multiple scales—from individual to family to neighborhood and community. We build this understanding with community members as co-researchers, recognizing and centering the knowledge held by those who are directly affected by policing, incarceration, and related systems. An intergenerational, multi-sited participatory action research (PAR) approach invites cohorts of adult and youth community members to define questions and methods for investigation, connecting lived experiences to an analysis of systems and institutions in order to learn not only what is going on, but also what we can do about it.
Community visions for collective safety and mutual care
This approach to research includes inviting the larger Black community into dialogue about how to define new goals for safety and well-being, by bringing the findings of PAR cohorts into public engagement forums. Along with community-based organization partners, we will bring creative tools like photography, podcasting, and interactive mapping exercises, sharing research findings through storytelling and highlighting findings of promising ideas, concepts, and practices for community safety. These activities will emerge from the participatory research practice and Imagine Black Futures’ work learning about models used around the nation.
Memory & Place in Black Portland
Cover of photo and poetry chapbook.
The “Memory & Place in Black Portland” project is based on a course taught by Portland State University professors Walidah Imarisha (Black Studies), Ryan Petteway (Public Health, Black Studies), and Lisa Bates (Urban Studies, Black Studies). In Black Portland History and Memory (BST411), students explored community building specifically in relationship to Black communities in Portland. Students engaged in history-centered conversations regarding placemaking, communities of care, collective safety, and multi-system impacts. A collaborative course, students were encouraged to bring their own personal experiences forward in the class to illuminate connections to the past. One of the ways students engaged was through creative participatory activities of photovoice (writing narratives based on photos), geopoems (writing poems about specific places), and participatory mapping — enabling them to literally and figuratively place their words on the map of Black Portland.
We organized BST 411 students’ work for a curated public exhibit at PSU in May 2024. The work below — a photo and poetry chapbook — presents just some of the work created by the Black Studies students who are currently incarcerated at Oregon State Penitentiary. The students chose locations in and around Portland to reflect in narratives and poetry; these were photographed by students in PSU’s Project Rebound, which supports students returning to the community from incarceration. Through the distinct voices of each student, their place and time-rooted memories of meaningful experiences, and the photography and reading presented here on campus, we expand and enhance our understanding of Portland’s Black history as it was and is experienced by community members.