User:Umbono/Ronald L. Jackson II

Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Ronald L. Jackson II is a professor of African American Studies and Media Studies at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Of his ten books, the one that has perhaps been most widely read is his 2006 book "Scripting the Black Masculine Body in Popular Media," where he discusses the identity politics that are tethered to representations of race in the United States. His work developed his current trajectory while he was in his PhD program in the Department of Communication & Culture at Howard University. There he launched his inquiry into the study of identity negotiation, a concept that presupposes that people not only socially construct their identities, but also struggle to define and redefine identity and identification. From that initial project emerged a theory called cultural contracts theory. This is simply a paradigm that suggests that if people truly negotiate their identities, then there must be something in particular that gets negotiated. Jackson argues that people negotiate their worldviews when they come in contact with cultural others, but do so in very nuanced ways when power becomes a dynamic that enters into intercultural interaction. This work on identity negotiation spawned the development of the Black Masculine Identity Theory, which is described in his "Scripting the Black Masculine Body in Popular Media" book. His work in African American Studies is foundationally tied to his research on African American communication. His books, "Understanding African American Rhetoric" (co-edited with Elaine Richardson) and "African American Communication (with Michael Hecht and Sidney Ribeau) are important texts that have established Professor Jackson as one of the leading African American Studies scholars in the nation. Other than Molefi Asante, perhaps no one is more well-known for doing African American Communication research than Ronald L. Jackson II.