Jackson Woods

Portrait of Jackson Woods

Program Manager, Microsoft 2016-2017 CSCC Postdoctoral Fellow

Jackson Woods was a 2016-2017 CSCC postdoctoral fellow. He is currently a program manager at Microsoft. He received his Ph.D. from the George Washington University in 2016. His dissertation research, Online Foreign Policy Discourse in Contemporary China, examines both the emergence of online dissent concerning foreign policy issues and variation in the state's response to such events. Utilizing an original dataset containing hundreds of millions of social media posts, it argues that the combination of popular nationalist sentiments and the relative effectiveness of official propaganda can help explain the outcomes we observe on the Chinese Internet. Challenges will typically only emerge when the government mishandles an issue of nationalist significance. Meanwhile, online repression of the public's foreign policy discourse centers on "surprising" events: those for which the CCP has difficulty deploying ready-made response narratives. His broader interests include Chinese public opinion, Chinese security, text analysis, and survey research. His work has appeared in peer-reviewed publications such as the Journal of Contemporary China, and he has spent over two years living in China for study and research. He received his B.A. in Chinese Studies and Political Science from the University of Michigan.