Sarah J. Jackson

Sarah J. Jackson is the author of A Second Sight: How the Wonder and Vision of Black Mediamakers Push America Toward Freedom (2026), a cultural history tracing how Black American mediamakers have shaped democratic critique and imagination in the United States. A scholar of race, media, and politics, her other works include #HashtagActivism (2020) and Black Celebrity, Racial Politics, and the Press (2014). She is an Associate Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and co-directs the Media, Inequality & Change Center. Jackson was a 2020 Andrew Carnegie Fellow. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Atlantic.

Selected Work

• A Second Sight: How the Wonder and Vision of Black Mediamakers Push America Toward Freedom: A cultural history of Black mediamaking in the United States, tracing how Black journalists, filmmakers, and other storytellers have used “second sight” to diagnose democratic failures and imagine more just futures. (Mariner Books / HarperCollins, 2026)
• #HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice: A spanning scholarly analysis of how digital activism—especially Black and feminist organizing during the heyday of Twitter—reshaped media, politics, and public discourse in the twenty-first century. (MIT Press, 2020)
• The Headlines That Are Covering Up Police Violence: An examination in The Atlantic of how media framing shapes public understanding of protest and police violence, and how those frames obscure or distort the democratic demands at the heart of racial justice movements.