Professor wins mentor award

Jason Jackson, IU associate professor of folklore in the College of Arts and Sciences, is the recipient of the annual Faculty Mentor Award.

He received the award April 28 at the annual IU Graduate School Awards Ceremony in recognition of his “outstanding commitment and mentorship to graduate students at IU Bloomington,” said Graduate and Professional Student Organization coordinator Angela Jones.

The annual Faculty Mentor Award is presented to one professor by the GPSO and the University Graduate School. All graduate and professional students are invited to give their support to faculty members who they feel deserve special recognition for exemplary behavior.

“Receiving this award was a huge surprise and very moving and meaningful to me,” Jackson said, who is also editor of Museum Anthropology Review, an open access journal that he and his colleagues founded in early 2007. “The news came just as I was beginning to shake off a difficult period in my work, and it was a tremendous reminder of all that is amazing about the job that I have the good fortune to do.”

Jackson also said this award is a great opportunity to highlight the commitment of the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology to leadership in the areas of teaching and mentoring.

“Teaching in general is an honor and a privilege,” Jackson said. “But studying with, and learning from, graduate students of the caliber of those with whom I work is a rare and remarkable thing.”

With this recognition, Jackson hopes to call campus-wide attention to the excellence of the students associated with the program. He raises the issue of economic funding to be able to pursue better research, highlighting the “doing more with less” ideology that he says his department has been pursuing for many years.

“While academically excellent, I also have in mind the remarkable degree to which the graduate students manage to create both community and careers out of very, very scarce resources,” Jackson said. “These students are entrepreneurs and bricoleurs. They would be that much stronger if we could offer them additional faculty and financial support.”

In addition to being a faculty member in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, Jackson is an adjunct associate professor of anthropology and an affiliated faculty member in the American Studies Program and the Cultural Studies Program at IU. He works with students in all of these areas.

Jackson emphasized the idea that he and his colleagues tend to work with each student as they pursue a highly individualized course of study and research. Many of his students pursue fieldwork projects on diverse topics around the world in places as different as Kazakhstan, Israel, Japan and Canada’s Northwest Territories.

“Quality, quantity and diversity are our key words,” Jackson said. “Sometimes exhaustion is one too.”

Jackson said he is appreciative of the unique opportunities to work with students that he is given on a daily basis.

“The graduate students that I work with are amazing people from whom I learn daily,” Jackson said. “They are kind and smart and they really care about fostering community, both among themselves and in the wider world. These students are seeking to prepare for the human challenges of the 21st century, and I am thankful for all the ways that they enrich my life.”