Jean Jackson, one of the earliest members of MIT’s Anthropology program and a founding member of the Women’s and Gender Studies program (formerly Women’s Studies), will retire this spring after 42 years as a faculty member. Jackson has done fieldwork in Mexico, Guatemala, and, for more than 45 years, Colombia. She’s written about kinship and marriage, anthropological linguistics, missionaries, and Colombia’s indigenous rights movement, among other topics. She’s now working on a book about the last two decades of her fieldwork, chronicling changes in indigenous activism in Colombia.

Over the years, Jackson has helped build a tight-knit community with her Anthropology colleagues. “She thinks ethically and acts ethically at every scale, from the global geopolitical to the very interpersonal politics of the department. She communicates through action that we’re all in it together,” Anthropology program head Stefan Helmreich told the MIT News. One of Jackson’s points of pride: “Everyone we have hired has received tenure.”

Explore Professor Jackson’s research in the Open Access Articles collection in DSpace@MIT, where it is openly accessible to the world.

Since the MIT faculty established their Open Access Policy in March 2009 they have made thousands of research papers freely available to the world via DSpace@MIT. To highlight that research, we’re offering a series of blog posts that link news stories about scholars’ work to their open access papers in DSpace.