Davenport receives grant to explore how racial violence affects communities

June 25, 2021

The Legacy of Racial Violence, a 4-year project spearheaded by Christian Davenport, professor of political science, recently received funding from the Research Council of Norway. The Research Council is the Norwegian government's policy advisor and allocates over 1 million USD in research and innovation each year.

"I am immensely pleased with this outcome," Henrik Urdal, the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) director, said. "These projects address core challenges for the international society, and will provide novel knowledge to support policy decisions."

Davenport's project aims to fill in the gaps of understanding how historical racial violence affects current communities. It will use the U.S. as a research case and attempt to outline a process that will help the communities affected heal through restorative acts.

According to the PRIO website, "the project examines why and how type, severity, scope, and relative amount of racial violence affects economic, political, and health inequalities between, as well as within, Black and white communities in the United States."

A team of other researchers, including Sebastian Schutte at PRIO, Cyanne Loyle at Penn State University and PRIO, Yara M. Asi from the University of Central Florida and Adrian Arellano of the London School of Economics, will join Davenport. Pennsylvania State University's Department of Political Science is the institutional partner for the project.

Read the news items about Davenport and PRIO below: