Two distinct literatures grew up around the Portals, and the difference between them matters more than the volume.
The first treats the Portal as an object — a communication technology worth theorising. That is where the dissertations sit. The second treats it as an instrument — a way to collect conversation that no survey or focus group could reach. That is the Portals Policing Project, and it produced findings about American political life that the method itself made possible.
Research through Portals
The Portal as instrument: a way to collect conversation that no survey could reach.
Portals transform the capacity of disparate people and communities to define their own narratives and engage one another politically — and therefore to be more politically efficacious.
Built on more than 800 conversations about policing between residents of communities where that form of state action is concentrated.
Studies regularly conclude ordinary Americans lack the knowledge to form meaningful political preferences. This study of highly policed communities finds the opposite problem.
Develops Portals as a new method for collecting conversation between Black residents about contact with state surveillance.
Unfreedom is expanding even in democratic societies. The population passing through prisons and detention today eclipses historical precedent.
The Portals Policing Project
850+
Conversations
14
Neighbourhoods
6
Cities
2
Universities
Research on Portals
The Portal as object: what is this thing, and what does it do to people?
A PhD dissertation in communication studies that takes the Portal as its central object, arguing new communication technologies are better understood as atmospheric than as channels.
Theorizes connection itself as the unit of analysis in public diplomacy, using Portals as the case.
On the new spaces technology opens for the exchange of feeling with diverse others — and what everyday talk does inside them.
Modern communication technology combined with the simplicity of an unadorned mobile room.
After one Portal session, 90% of participants had their assumptions about people different from themselves change; 95% shifted perspective on the theme of the connection.
30% of those surveyed came to Downtown Tempe specifically for the Portal — people who otherwise would not have been there.
Program reports
Nearly 20,000 people connected in Twitter’s largest consumer-facing marketing campaign to that date.