Dr. Shirley A. Jackson is a professor in the Sociology Department at Portland State University. Dr. Jackson attended the University of California, Santa Barbara where she received her doctorate in sociology with specializations in race, social movements, and gender. She began her career in the Ethnic Studies Department at Bowling Green State University. She was the department chair of the Department of Sociology at Southern Connecticut State University (where she created the minor in Ethnic Studies) and the Black Studies Department at Portland State University.
Dr. Jackson is the 2016 recipient of the Society for the Study of Social Problems' Doris Wilkinson Faculty Leadership Award and has received the State of Connecticut’s African American Affairs Commission’s Woman of the Year award. Dr. Jackson has served on the State of Oregon’s Ethnic Studies Advisory Committee that developed ethnic studies standards for Oregon’s K-12 schools. She is the editor of The Handbook of Race, Class, and Gender (Routledge/Taylor & Francis 2014) and co-editor of Caged Women: Incarceration, Representation, and Media (2018, Routledge/Taylor & Francis). She is currently working on three projects. The first is a socio-historical exploration of U.S. and global themes of race/ethnicity and gender in political cartoons during WWII and the Civil Rights Movement. She is also conducting a comparative analysis of the 1961 Cuban Literacy Campaign and the 1964 Freedom Summer Project in Mississippi. Her most recent project explores the intersection of gender, race, and space focusing primarily on the experiences of African American women in white-dominated spheres. As a scholar-activist, Dr. Jackson has given numerous talks and has appeared on television, radio, and in local, national, and global print media speaking on issues related to BLM protests, social movements, Black women, racism, and social inequality. Dr. Jackson has also served as an expert witness for state and federal defense attorneys and prosecutors.
She enjoys solving crossword puzzles, novels by Stephen King, and Alfred Hitchcock films which may explain why she became a professor!