Professor Jackson is a feminist scholar, activist, and African historian. She is an Associate Professor in Gender and Women’s Studies as well as African American Studies. She is also an affiliated faculty member in the History Department at UIC. Dr. Jackson has completed extensive research with the Pan African Association in Chicago, which is the foundation for her work with GCI.
For her current project, “New African Diaspora in Chicago: Memories, Maps, and Communities,” there are two major objectives. The first is to respond to the paucity of detailed and in-depth studies on Chicago’s growing African immigrant and refugee communities, specifically those coming from the following three regions of the African continent: Northeastern Africa (Sudan, Somalia, Eritrea and Ethiopia), Mano River States (Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea) and Great Lake Region (Burundi, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.) The second is to interrogate the way in which the protean term African diaspora is deployed, particularly in the media and by various non-governmental, national and multilateral organizations. This project is within GCI’s Dynamics of Global Mobility research cluster.
