Marissa Jackson Sow Receives $27,000 from the Institute of International Education
Marissa Jackson Sow, assistant professor of law, will receive a $27,000 grant from the Institute of International Education, in partnership with the Open Society Foundations, to support her research and writing in the areas of Black and Indigenous legal issues, Black women’s advocacy, and Black feminist legal thought.
Jackson Sow is nationally recognized for her ability to weave storytelling and legal archaeology into her scholarship. Continuing work undertaken as a Leadership in Government Fellow of the Open Society Foundations in 2020, Jackson Sow will use IIE funding to develop repositories of readings and cases that center Black and Indigenous people in the areas of contracts, constitutional law, international human rights law, and law and philosophy. She will also curate creative digital installations that leverage visual culture and the arts to amplify Black women’s human rights histories and further breathe life into the repositories.
“This funding is incredibly meaningful to me as a teacher, scholar, and community member,” says Jackson Sow, “and I look forward to investing it in creating amazing pedagogical and scholarly resources for and with the University of Richmond community, honoring the Richmond tradition of creative inquiry and teaching that makes a difference.”
In addition, Jackson Sow will work toward transforming her legal archaeology work on Black women’s advocacy and contemporary Black feminist legal thought into an edited volume. In both projects, Sow will ensure democratized access to her work, making it freely available for public use.
Jackson Sow’s most recent projects build upon her existing body of work. Her article, “Whiteness as Contract in the Racial Superstate” is forthcoming in the U.C. Irvine Law Review, and in 2023, she authored “More Than An Icon: Taking Shirley Chisholm at Her Word,” in A Seat at the Table: Black Women Public Intellectuals in US History and Culture, published by the University Press of Mississippi. Jackson Sow is also the author of “Ukrainian Racial Contracting and the Geopolitics of Welcome in International Refugee Law,” which is forthcoming in Race, Racism, and International Law (edited by Devon Carbado, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Justin Desautels-Stein, and Chantal Thomas), to be published by the Stanford University Press.