Kathryn Jackson, PhD

Kate Jackson is an assistant professor in the Department of Community and Global Health in COH. Kate earned her Ph.D. in Public Affairs and Community Development from Rutgers University-Camden. Kate's research and teaching focus on the intersection of environment, race, and health. As a community-engaged scholar, she draws from the traditions of community-based participatory action research and theories of critical environmental justice to analyze how structural racism and intersecting systems of inequality in the environment contribute to community health outcomes. In her work, health and the environment are defined broadly by members of communities (those with lived experience) that she partners with and include mental, spiritual, psychological, emotional, and environmental well-being.  Kate relies on community-engaged principles to ensure that community concerns and wisdom guide her research with the goal of empowerment and health equity. Having spent over 15 years working in social service and policy in various areas of community health, she has observed firsthand the way that not only pollution but also housing, education, access to health care, mass incarceration, poverty, rapid redevelopment, lead poisoning, and racial violence have a cumulative impact on health and well-being. The best interventions and outcomes she has observed have come from what she identifies as “reciprocal relationships” between communities and institutions of knowledge/service.  Kate uses an intersectional and interdisciplinary approach to community health to examine how, in partnership with the community, we can redress structural inequalities and health disparities through scholarship and action. 

Instagram: roots_of_restoration
Instagram: mapping4ej
 

Courses