John L. Jackson, Jr.
Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology

Assistant professor of cultural anthropology John L. Jackson, Jr. teaches "The Documentary Experience: A Video Approach" (PPS105S). This fall the theme for the video course is "The Body and Culture." Students will produce documentaries that examine human bodies as socially and politically significant entities. Students chosen for the course will use their documentaries to mine a specific body (or bodies) for its/their personal, social, political and/or cultural meanings in daily life. The course is co-sponsored by the Hart Leadership Program, the Center for Documentary Studies, and the Program in Film and Video.

Before joining Duke’s faculty in the fall of 2002, Jackson was a junior fellow in Harvard University’s Society of Fellows. He received his Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from Columbia University in 2000. His first book, Harlemworld: Doing Race and Class in Contemporary Black America (University of Chicago Press 2001), examines the interconnections between racial identity and socioeconomic status that define the lives of black folks today. In addition to this Harlem research, he has conducted three years of field-work in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and published several "experimental essays" based on this research, including "Ethnophysicality, or an Ethnography of Some Body" in Soul: Black Power, Politics and Pleasure (NYU Press 1997) and "The Soles of Black Folk: These Reeboks Were Made for Runnin' from the White Man" in Race Consciousness: African American Studies in the Next Century (NYU Press 1996). As a film producer, he has also produced a nationally-distributed documentary, several internationally-screened film-shorts, and an award-winning 16mm feature film.