Robert Jensen is an associate professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. Jensen will be our guest on Upstream tonight, Thursday, February 28th. Jensen is the author of Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (South End Press, 2007) and The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege (City Lights, 2005), among other works (see below.)

Tonight we will be discussing privilege and Jensen's most recent projects on pornography and masculinity. Upstream is social justice radio that goes against the mainstream flow.

Robert Jensen joined the UT faculty in 1992 after completing his Ph.D. in media ethics and law in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota. Prior to his academic career, he worked as a professional journalist for a decade. At UT, Jensen teaches courses in media law, ethics, and politics. He also is director of the Senior Fellows Program, the honors program of the College of Communication.

In his research, Jensen draws on a variety of critical approaches to media and power. Much of his work has focused on pornography and the radical feminist critique of sexuality and men's violence. In more recent work, he has addressed questions of race through a critique of white privilege and institutionalized racism.

In addition to teaching and research, Jensen writes for popular media, both alternative and mainstream. His opinion and analytic pieces on such subjects as foreign policy, politics, and race have appeared in papers around the country. He also is involved in a number of activist groups working against U.S. military and economic domination of the rest of the world.

Jensen is also the author of Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (City Lights, 2004); and Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream (Peter Lang, 2001); co-author with Gail Dines and Ann Russo of Pornography: The Production and Consumption of Inequality (Routledge, 1998); and co-editor with David S. Allen of Freeing the First Amendment: Critical Perspectives on Freedom of Expression (New York University Press, 1995).