Roderick E. Jackson is a proud Black Chicagoan, husband, and photographer whose research explores the nexus of race, class, and gender through an interrogation of the value of Black, male labor within a post-industrial context in peri-urban cities. Focusing on Gary, Indiana—the former steel capital of the United States in the wake of the Great Recession of 2008—his work investigates how Black working-class men thrive and build community within hyper-masculine spaces of socioeconomic marginalization. He is also interested in visual ethnographic practices that challenge the narrow representations of Blackness within contemporary media discourse. He graduated cum laude from the University of Massachusetts Amherst with a B.A. in Anthropology.
Roderick is also a music producer, composer, and co-founder of the Grammy-nominated production duo Tensei. His music has been featured on television shows, including the South Side on HBO Max and The Blacklist on NBC. Roderick is a member of the Black Geosonicologies Research Working Group and is currently collaborating with his wife april l. graham-jackson on a multimedia project exploring the interplay between the sociosonic, musical, and visual textures of Black life in Chicagoland.
