James M. Jasper

James Macdonald Jasper (born 1957) is a writer and sociologist who has taught Ph.D. students at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York since 2007. He is best known for his research and theories about culture and politics, especially the cultural and emotional dimensions of protest movements.

Jasper was born on September 30, 1957, in Takoma Park, Maryland, adjacent to Washington, D.C. His parents, Jane Howard-Jasper (born Betty Jane Howard) and James Dudley Jasper, separated just before he was born, and he was raised exclusively by his mother. He has no siblings.

Graduating in 1975 from Saint James School, where he was elected Senior Prefect, Jasper attended Harvard College. He received a B.A. magna cum laude in economics in 1979. He was awarded an M.A. and then a Ph.D. in sociology in 1988 at the University of California at Berkeley.

Jasper taught at New York University from January 1987 to the summer of 1996, leaving after a protracted tenure battle that attracted angry letters from sociologists around the United States. In the following ten years he taught as a visiting professor at Columbia, Princeton, and the New School for Social Research. Since the fall of 2007 he has been affiliated with the Sociology Ph.D. program of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he founded the Politics and Protest Workshop.

Jasper has been writing about politics and culture since the mid-1980s. His books include Nuclear Politics, about energy policy in France, Sweden, and the United States; The Animal Rights Crusade, an examination of the moral dimensions of protest coauthored with Dorothy Nelkin; The Art of Moral Protest, which developed cultural understandings of social movements and reintroduced emotions as an analytic dimension; Restless Nation, which looks at the negative and positive effects of Americans’ propensity to move so often; and Getting Your Way, which offers a sociological language for talking about strategic action that avoids the determinism of game theory.

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