Profile
Jahmese Fort is a doctoral candidate in the University of California, San Diego Communication Department. She studies notions of citizenship as expressed through moments of altered civic participation. As a theoretical concept, altered civic participation is as relevant to activities such as voting and military service as it is relevant to issues less commonly associated with citizenship such as the choice to marry or support the inclusion of certain spaces on the national registry of historic sites. Her current research focuses primarily on instances of evasion, boycotting, and partial cooperation in the 2010 U.S. Census survey. Her dissertation positions the survey as a site that provides a unique opportunity for America's residents to contest and re-imagine dominant notions of belonging and citizenship. Jahmese examines the relationship between the exclusivity of Classic citizenship, historical trauma experienced by America's marginalized groups, and altered civic engagement. Her research contributes to existing literatures on American democracy’s decline, barriers to Census participation, and civic engagement behaviors. Her long-term research goals are to reveal ways in which groups deemed deficient of proper civic behavior are often engaged in ways that are illegible according to the limited definition of civic engagement offered by the civic republican tradition. Jahmese’s research is motivated by her desire to produce research whose findings might disallow the mislabeling of marginalized groups in the U.S. as “apathetic.” Her work calls attention to the inventive ways marginalized groups express discontent with their access to protection, representation, and resources due a citizen.
