Dr Ima Jackson
Professor of Community Engagement in Research, Social Policy and Infrastructure Development.
Ima is a community engaged researcher working broadly within migration and with those who are adversely racialised within society. She works regularly across portfolios with Scottish Government Ministers, their civil servants and policy makers. Over the last 20 years as unprecedented migration has changed Scotland’s demography her work has built from the experiences of those who are marginalised within our systems of policy development and service provision. Her work is based in social justice and aims to disrupt systemic processes and uses the authority given to the Academy to support communities evidence their experiences through research to those that make decisions about them.
This work requires her to develop trust with and sustain commitment to people in communities who are adversely racialised, alongside the policy makers and service planners who often are not used to engaging with the communities they serve.
Within an anti-racism intersectional approach to practice she works in a pragmatic way across health, education, the cultural sector and skills and employability. Her work informs policy and service provision both nationally and internationally. Her research in recent years has been in areas as diverse as developing national infrastructure for overseas skills recognition; suicide prevention; interpreting educational resources; and evidencing the expertise of women and girls of African descent to inform national policy to prevent female genital alteration.
She is currently:
Co- Chair of the Antiracism Interim Governance Group which is leading on the development of a new national anti-racism Observatory to help establish systemic anti-racism in Scotland, so that the design and delivery of our public institutions, policy, services, and strategies are competent and fit for purpose.
Co- chair of the Scottish Migrant Health Research Strategy Group (SMEHRS).
Supporting a host of brilliant important small, often fragile community groups.
Ima declined an OBE in 2022 but accepted a Fellowship of the RSE in 2023.
She recently opted to step down as:
Co-chair of the First Minister’s National Advisory Council on Women and Girls though remains a member of the Council. Chair of the Board for the CCA- Centre for Contemporary Art Glasgow though remains a member of the Board.
Co- chair of the Expert Advisory group on COVID-19 and Ethnicity
She is currently Principal Investigator for Skills Recognition Scotland a community led practical infrastructure development research project which has developed a national process in Scotland for skills recognition of those who migrate.
She is supervisor for several PhD students and always interested to supervise MSc and PhD students researching aspects of adversely racialised experiences which evidences the intersectional knowledge and expertise held by people and communities about their own lives.