Hello! My name is Dr. Mary A. Jackson (she/her) although you can call me Mary. I am Program Coordinator for the Outdoor Education Leadership MA and Associate Faculty at Prescott.

My academic and professional work integrate adventure and outdoor education, sustainable tourism, and women's human rights and empowerment. My research interests include nature-culture relationships and Nepal and Himalayan studies. I emphasize a theoretical approach of new materialist and posthumanist methodologies. I’m interested in the entanglement of seemingly disparate ideas and how they smash together and then separate, but forever connected by that coming together—in other words, entanglement. As a visual artist, I examine concepts of embodied experience and process in both oil and watercolor paintings.

My career in the outdoors began essentially when I was born with my parents taking me camping in my first few weeks of life. Nature, the outdoors, and traveling the world was an integral part of my youth as I became a  NOLS student, Outward Bound instructor, and led educational adventure expeditions in Africa, Asia, and Latin America with World Challenge Expeditions. Throughout my career in outdoor education, I have worked for a variety of programs in facilitation, guiding, and women's empowerment including my own international adventure tourism company. I have earned an AMGA SPI certification (it has since expired), and keep my WMI WFR certification active. Through the years, my favorite adventure activities included traveling (can't wait until that is allowed again!), rock climbing, mountaineering, backpacking, and hiking. I recognize the privilege I have as a cisgender, white, middle-class woman that made the outdoors commonplace as a child and allowed me to attend my NOLS semester during undergrad, jumpstarting my career. I am interested in reconfiguring the meaning and enactments of adventure and outdoor education beyond the confines of dominant cultural norms, traditions, abilities, and so on.

I hold a Ph.D. in Sustainability Education and an MA in Adventure Education from Prescott College. I earned a BFA in Painting and Printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. My non-academic interests include Star Wars, space, listening to Neil Degrasse Tyson's podcast, Star Talk, and our orange tabby, Hobbes.

Mary instructs in the following degree programs

• Outdoor Education Leadership (MA)