Media Portrayals of Wildfire Displacement and Homelessness with Maude Hines and Janet Cowal

In this episode of PDXPLORES, Portland State professors Maude Hines (English, Black Studies, Homelessness Research & Action Collaborative) and Janet Cowal (Applied Linguistics, Homelessness Research & Action Collaborative) discuss their recently published article, Natural/Disaster: Differential Media Portrayals of Wildfire Displacement and Homelessness in Portland, Oregon, co-authored by Idowu (Jola) Ajibade, Emily Leickly, Marta Petteni, and Stefanie Knowlton. The research explores media coverage of the 2020 wildfires in Oregon and the differential language used to cover those affected by the devastating blazes. Click on the Download button to access the audio transcript

mature Themes : Childhood in the African American Literary Scene of Encounter

This essay introduces Encounter, a literary device that juxtaposes the themes we tend to call mature —such as addiction, poverty, and police brutality—with maturity\u27s apparent antithesis: childhood. As both a literary device and a methodology, Encounter is an aesthetic form that uses childhood to make ideology visible. Its hallmark attributes—didacticism, gothic echoes, paradoxical innocence, temporal elasticity, and hopeful futurity—marshal associations with childhood to emphasize and expose White supremacy\u27s ideology at work. The lens of Encounter illuminates the centrality of childhood in twentieth-century texts for children and adults by major writers in the African American literary tradition, including W.E.B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, and James Baldwin. The essay builds on current work in critical childhood studies, theories of racial identity development, and critical examination of the haunting persistence of slavery and its afterlives in the nation\u27s racial consciousness

Drawing the Line: The Giving Tree\u27s Adult Lessons

When I was nine years old, having recently devoured Shel Silverstein\u27s first book of children\u27s poems, I discovered nude photos of the author in Playboy magazine. A neighbor had left a trunk full of Playboys with us (his wife objected to them), so naturally I snuck two or three of them at a time to my bedroom, where I could read them in private. I wasn\u27t aware that Silverstein in a Nudist Camp was only one installment of many he wrote for Playboy, but I was struck by the similarity of the cartoons in the article to the drawings in his children\u27s books. Several black-and-white photographs accompanied the cartoons, but the one that stuck with me was of a naked Silverstein walking down a wooded path away from the camera, flanked by women similarly unadorned, their rear ends the most prominent feature of the photo. I couldn\u27t read Silverstein again without seeing that image

Panel. Family as Fate and Fantasm

Fiends, Fauns, and Fantasms: Finding Family in Faulkner’s Supernatural / Kristi Rowan Humphreys, Baylor UniversityThis study analyzes Faulkner’s “undead” and “supernatural” families in the screenplay Dreadful Hollow and the stories “Beyond” and “Black Music,” through the lens of the family sacrifice and obligation that were very real aspects of Faulkner’s own experiences.In “Beyond,” the Judge sacrifices any hope of heaven so that he can lie next to his son; in “Black Music,” Wilfred abandons the only existence he has ever known so that his wife can live in luxury; and in Dreadful Hollow, Julian sacrifices her own comfort for the needs of her family. Reading Faulkner’s supernatural stories from a perspective of family obligation and sacrifice adds an important layer to their interpretations because it grounds what is “beyond the lot and plan for mortal human man” in the realities of human experience.Childhood and Destiny: Encountering Fate in Faulkner\u27s Fiction / Maude Hines, Portland State UniversityBrides of Death: Freedom and Fate in Faulkner’s Tragic Families / Anne MacMaster, Millsaps CollegeA focus on an aristocratic household—-the oikos—-is part of the tragic form, according to Aristotle, and violence, deliberate or otherwise, is more likely to be tragic if committed against a closely related person, such as a family member. Lessons learned from Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides undergird theme and action in both The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! – Faulkner’s two novels in the tragic mode. In these tragic novels, as in the Attic plays that Rush Rehm studies in Marriage to Death, “the conflation of weddings and funeral . . . sheds particular light on women” (8), and we can apply Rehm’s observations about Greek tragic characters to Caddy, Judith, and to other of Faulkner’s characters who become brides of death: “The dramatic power and appeal of many of these heroines arises from their being engaged in, committed to, or trapped by a ‘marriage to death’” (Rehm 8)

Stories from the Outside: Oregon Wildfires 2020

These are the preliminary results of an ongoing project. Stories from the Outside centers the voices of people experiencing homelessness during the 2020 Oregon wildfire season. PSU’s Homelessness Research & Action Collaborative, in partnership with the Street Roots Ambassadors program, surveyed 73 people in the Portland area in June 2021. Ambassadors sought out Black, Indigenous, and Other People of Color to ensure their voices were represented as BIPOC residents are disproportionately impacted by homelessness. Many respondents felt disconnected and left out of emergency relief efforts. These are their stories. Overview: The most destructive wildfires in Oregon’s history spread across the state in September 2020, burning more than 1 million acres and 4,000 homes. At least 11 people died, 40,000 were evacuated, and about 500,000 were in evacuation warning areas. Air quality was so hazardous that it exceeded the state’s Air Quality Index, pushing the state to declare a Public Health Emergency. Local, state, and federal emergency management and relief organizations responded to the devastation. Those impacted needed food, shelter, and clean air to breathe. All those who needed assistance were in a similar position — they were without homes and needed respite from the smoky conditions. When providing services, however, some relief efforts distinguished between those who were housed before the fires, and those who were unhoused. At least one shelter denied relief to those they identified as “homeless” or “transients.” Some experiencing homelessness were left out altogether -- never hearing about any relief efforts. Key Findings: Half said smoke impacted their health 37% reported difficulty breathing 15% went to the hospital (trouble breathing, seizures, asthma, and Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) One respondent went to the hospital four times Half rated the level of stress at 8 or higher on a scale of 1-10 with 10 being extremely stressful. 75% did not receive any information about support during the wildfire event 68.5% did not receive any help during the wildfire even

PSU’s Homelessness Research and Action Collaborative (HRAC): A Shared Leadership Journey

Portland State University\u27s (PSU\u27s) Homelessness Research and Action Collaborative\u27s (HRAC\u27s) commitment to shared leadership is represented in the use of collaborative in our name, and has been important from our earliest discussions of our mission and goals. This chapter discusses our journey in shared leadership. In it we outline the history and development of the research center, the process of designing a shared leadership structure, and how challenges encountered along the way led to our current approach. The collaborative approach among the research center leadership team to writing this chapter integrates a diverse set of perspectives and enables a more transparent analysis of the HRAC model

Natural / Disaster: Differential Media Portrayals of Wildfire Displacement and Homelessness in Portland, Oregon

The devastating 2020 wildfires in Oregon provide an opportunity to revisit the “discursive creation of homelessness” first identified by Céline Pascale in this journal in 2005. Drawing on physical observation of the unfolding event and discursive analysis of media reporting (print, radio, and television), we find radically different media coverage of people unhoused by wildfires and those previously unhoused but also affected by the fires. Journalistic uses of nomenclature and reported speech, portrayals of agency, and exclusion of marginalized voices provide current examples of the stratification of deservedness. The wildfires, deemed a natural disaster but simultaneously an “unnatural” cause of houselessness, reinforced the differential material treatment of “evacuees” as a special category deserving of aid and support in contrast to people living unhoused before the wildfires. Yet this reasoning ignores the temporal dimensions of displacement and lack of housing, which independent of their causes produce compounding and tangible socio-economic and physical effects on those affected. We argue that as climate change-related disasters such as wildfires displace more people in Oregon and across the United States, the origins of houselessness will be less meaningful while societal response and compassion will matter more

Changing the Narrative: Humanities Approaches to Houselessness: A Roundtable

In this roundtable, participants discuss how the humanities can help us engage with questions related to houselessness, for example by learning about the historical context of current situations, using storytelling to bring awareness of why individuals experience homelessness, and using imagination to develop solutions.https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/portland-center-humanities-psu/1000/thumbnail.jp