Jackson is the current chair of VCU’S Department of the African American Studies, and Associate Professor in the Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs. Dr. Jackson earned her B.A. in Political Science at Georgia State University and her M.A. and doctorate at Clark-Atlanta University. Her scholarship focuses on race, gender and politics in the U.S. alternative and complementary medicine, and public policy and health care; she is especially interested in comparative studies of racism and the impact of culture, science and technology on health and well-being. Dr. Jackson was the first Rockefeller Post-Doctoral Fellow in the African-American Studies Program at the University of Maryland, College Park, and in 1999, she was recognized by the American Political Science Association for her teaching. Dr. Jackson is co-editor of African-Americans and the New Policy Consensus: Retreat of the Liberal State? (with Marilyn Lashley, Greenwood Press, 1994), and a poet whose poem, “Hear Voices,” is engraved on the African American monument at the site of the old Valentine Riverside Museum in Richmond. Most recently, she completed work on a needs assessment of Virginians with spinal cord injury, funded by the Commonwealth Neurotrauma Initiative, focusing on the needs, challenges and strengths of women, and minorities with SCI.

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