This brief lecture will examine a few of the reasons why academics—and anthropologists in particular—are often hyper-skeptical of the film camera as a way of accurately/effectively representing social life. Arguing for the value of “multi-modal scholarship,” Jackson seeks to challenge some of the ways in which ways in which academicians dismiss non-written forms of knowledge production.
John L. Jackson, Jr., is Dean of the School of Social Policy & Practice and Richard Perry University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He earned his BA in Communication (Radio/TV/Film) from Howard University and his PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University before serving as a junior fellow at the Harvard University Society of Fellows and becoming Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. He is the author of several books, including Harlemworld (2001); Real Black (2005); Racial Paranoia (2008); Thin Description (2013) and Impolite Conversations, co-written with Cora Daniels ( 2014). His is also editor of Social Policy and Social Justice (2016). His most recently completed film, co-directed with Deborah A. Thomas, is Bad Friday: Rastafari after Coral Gardens (2012), and he is Executive Producer of 4 Days in May, which is screening at BlackStar this year. He is also one of the collaborators on Making Sweet Tea, a documentary to be completed later this summer. Jackson’s work explores how film and other non-traditional or multi-modal formats can be used in scholarly research projects, and he is one of the founding members of CAMRA and EE@Penn (experimental ethnography @Penn), two University of Pennsylvania initiatives organized around creating visual and performative research projects and producing rigorous criteria for assessing them.