Former Duke University anthropologist John Jackson has arrived at Penn to kick off Penn Integrates Knowledge, the University's initiative to recruit faculty members who will have appointments in multiple departments.
Jackson will be teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in both the Annenberg School for Communication and the School of Arts and Sciences, where he will share his research on issues of race, religion, class and the impact of the media in contemporary America. Taking time from his jam-packed schedule as a new father, Jackson opened up about meeting Penn students, the dangers of Facebook.com and figuring out how to be in two places at once.
DP: Congratulations on having a baby! Things must be pretty hectic for you?
JJ: Yes, thank you. They are.
DP: Do you expect a similar sleep-deprived schedule at Penn?
JJ: If you learn anything [at school], you learn how to schedule your days so that you can get your work done and still get a little bit of sleep.
DP: True. What have you been doing to prepare for Penn?
JJ: I'm finishing up a book project. It's on contemporary social paranoia in the United States. I've also been learning about Philadelphia. . [It's] this bona-fide urban city in a way that Durham wasn't. . I've also got to figure out Penn, which is a really elaborate institution, and figure out how it works, . [since] I'm sure it'll have its own individual quirks.
DP: How do you feel about being the first PIK professor? You've sort of become the poster one for the entire initiative.
JJ: It's going to be tough to figure out what it means for the way I divide my time. In some ways, you want to be fully 100 percent in both places, and that's kind of a hard thing to pull off.
DP: Going back to the topic of your book, do you find that American students are generally very paranoid?
JJ: I'm not sure that's true. But some of the new [technology] toys we have may in some ways heighten our capacity to use paranoia in ways we have never done before.
DP: Would you say that social networking sites like MySpace.com and Facebook feed into all of that?
JJ: Oh yeah. Those kinds of Internet phenomena are definitely part of the equation. We have to monitor kids on a space like MySpace because the kids are being treated like pariahs and [the sites are] preying on the young. We imagine these technologies as so incredibly beneficial, and they are, . but they sort of reanimate some of our ancient fears.
