On Wednesday, February 27, 2013 from 4:15pm to 5:30pm (Williams Center for the Arts, room 108), sociologist Shirley Jackson will give a presentation titled, “Civil Rights or Civil Menace? Making Meaning of the Civil Rights Movement through Editorial Cartoons.”
Shirley A. Jackson is Professor of Sociology at Southern Connecticut State University where she is also founder and co-coordinator of the Ethnic Studies Minor and Graduate Coordinator for the Department of Sociology. Dr. Jackson’s areas of research specialization are race/ethnicity, gender, and social movements. Her most recent research project 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 currently working on an edited volume titled International Handbook for Race, Class, and Gender to be published by Routledge/Taylor & Francis. Her talk will be based on her current research project that addresses race, gender, nationalism, and violence in editorial cartoons through four different eras: the years 1941-45 which encompass the involvement of the United States in World War II, the years 1963-65 which is encompasses the period six months prior to the signing of the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 through the six month period that followed the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1965, and an area that begins after the founding of the Black Panther Party in 1966 to the early 1970s. The aforementioned periods are characterized by complex social relations in the U.S. which are clearly indicated on the editorial pages of newspapers in the form of cartoons.