John Jackson

John L. Jackson, Jr. is a filmmaker and urban anthropologist who works at the intersection of visual culture, critical race theory, media studies, and the ethnography of diasporic religions. He is the Walter H. Annenberg Dean of the Annenberg School for Communication and Richard Perry University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He was previously Dean of the School of Social Policy & Practice and Special Adviser to the Provost on Diversity at Penn.

An urban researcher, media ethnographer, anthropologist of religion, and theorist of race/ethnicity, Jackson's work also critically explores how film and other non-traditional or multi-modal formats can be most effectively utilized in specifically scholarly research projects, and he is one of the founding members of CAMRA, the University of Pennsylvania-based initiative organized around creating visual and performative research projects and producing rigorous criteria for assessing them. He is currently a faculty member at Penn's new Center for Experimental Ethnography, and he has affiliations with Penn's Departments of Africana Studies and Anthropology, as well as with the Graduate School of Education and the School of Social Policy & Practice.

He is the author of Harlemworld: Doing Race and Class in Contemporary Black America (University of Chicago Press, 2001); Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity (University of Chicago Press, 2005); Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness (Basic Civitas, 2008); and Impolite Conversations: On Race, Politics, Sex, Money, and Religion (Atria/Simon & Schuster, 2014), co-written with Cora Daniels. He is also editor of Social Policy and Social Justice (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). His most recent films include Bad Friday: Rastafari after Coral Gardens (Third World Newsreel, 2012), co-directed with Deborah A. Thomas, and Making Sweet Tea: The Lives and Loves of Southern Black Gay Men, co-directed with Nora Gross.