DEPARTMENT OF BLACK STUDIES

Research Interests:

Cultural studies; Black and Latine popular culture; race and digital culture; Afro-Latin America, especially Panama and the Caribbean; history and politics of digital entertainment technologies; simulation of racial subjectivity; videogames; play and ludology; power, play, and pedagogy

Biography

Jalin Niamke Jackson (he/him) is a PhD candidate in Black Studies at Northwestern University. Focusing on popular culture, he studies how race and its intersections (with gender, sexuality, and so on) are produced, workshopped, and challenged within and through digital entertainment technologies and social media. His objects of interest include cultural discourses, digital cultures, and cultural artifacts (including film/television, music, and videogames) circulating between the 1990’s to present.

His dissertation examines the role of criticism in the production of cultural artifacts considered politically revolutionary, using videogames as the central case. He aims to historically contextualize the videogame medium’s oft-cited “revolutionary potential” to significantly disrupt current systems of oppression, and the role videogame criticism has played in this regard. More specifically, the dissertation traces and theorizes forms of videogame criticism (Black videogame criticism) that can indeed enable players, scholars, critics, game-makers, and modders to effectively combat the medium’s legacy of racism in different ways. Part of his close readings is grounded in critical digital ethnographies geared towards examining how videogame non-player characters experience and respond to their social environments in games featuring imagined histories of slavery and racial hierarchy.

His work frequently moves between Black Studies, Afro-Latin American Studies, Latinx Studies, Cultural Studies, and Videogame Studies. He conducts research in English and Spanish. His undergraduate training converged around the history of the Caribbean, especially the globalized contexts of Panama and Cuba, and textual analysis (English and Spanish) and archival methodologies. In addition, he earned a M.S. Ed. (University of Pennsylvania) in 2021 rooted in reflective practice, course design, the context of schooling in the U.S., and structuring learning and pedagogical experiences. Alongside his studies, he produces teaching and learning artifacts, facilitates workshops and presents on various topics related to pedagogy for graduate-student and other audiences. He also mods (“modifies”) videogames for the PC and has been doing so for over a decade.