Dr. Jackson conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Cape Town, South Africa between 1989 and 1997. This early research involved tracing the contours of “mixed-race” or Cape Coloured identity in the Western Cape Region. This research culminated in a Masters Thesis (University of Chicago) on the history of the Coloured category, and then a Dissertation (University of Chicago) on the topic of the politics of Coloured identity and the uses of the urban public sphere as material and discursive domains of identity-formation.

Subsequent archival research in 2001, funded by a University of Missouri, South Africa Exchange Grant, focused on Colonial architecture and early nineteenth-century urban planning as sources of the standardization that influenced on-going racial tensions over the manipulation of the city-center as a privileged domain of association.

A grant from the Social Sciences Research Council in 2004 facilitated research project focused on the uses of digital information as an Urban Planning tool and the prospects for participatory planning in the Kansas City region. Dr. Jackson is now seeking funding to extend this research into Cape Town, where she hopes to demonstrate ways in which standardizing mechanisms such as digital information extend the Modernist model of space developed in South Africa in the nineteenth century.

Dr. Jackson has also been contracted by the Center for Creative Studies at UMKC to ethnographically document the creative projects of students in the Theater and Engineering Departments. The ultimate goal of these research projects is to develop new perspectives on the relationship between embodiment and creativity and to publish an edited collection of essays on the subject.