James Macdonald Jasper (born 1957) is a writer and sociologist who has taught Ph.D. students at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York since 2007. He is best known for his research and theories about culture and politics, especially the cultural and emotional dimensions of protest movements.

Jasper was born on September 30, 1957, in Takoma Park, Maryland, adjacent to Washington, D.C. His parents, Jane Howard-Jasper (born Betty Jane Howard) and James Dudley Jasper, separated just before he was born, and he was raised exclusively by his mother.

Jasper was prepared at Saint James School, where he was elected Senior Prefect and graduated in the Class of 1975. He thence attended Harvard College where he received the Bachelor of Arts magna cum laude in economics(1979). He was awarded the M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in sociology from the University of California at Berkeley (1988).

Jasper taught at New York University from January 1987 to the summer of 1996, leaving after a protracted tenure battle that attracted angry letters from sociologists around the United States. In the following ten years, he taught as a visiting professor at Columbia University, Princeton University, and the New School for Social Research. Since the fall of 2007, he has been affiliated with the sociology Ph.D. program of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he founded the Politics and Protest Workshop.

Jasper has been writing about politics and culture since the mid-1980s. His books include Nuclear Politics, about energy policy in France, Sweden, and the United States; The Animal Rights Crusade, an examination of the moral dimensions of protest coauthored with Dorothy Nelkin; The Art of Moral Protest, which developed cultural understandings of social movements and reintroduced emotions as an analytic dimension; Restless Nation, which looks at the negative and positive effects of Americans’ propensity to move so often; and Getting Your Way, which offers a sociological language for talking about strategic action that avoids the determinism of game theory.

In recent years Jasper has turned from empirical studies of politics and protest to theoretical work on culture and politics. His most influential contribution has been to show that emotions are a part of culture, allowing humans to adapt to the world around them, to process information, and to engage with others. He differs from many culturally oriented scholars in embracing a kind of methodological individualism, insisting that beliefs, frames, collective identities, and emotions have an effect only through individuals.

Jasper has collaborated on a number of projects with Jeff Goodwin, a sociologist at New York University, including the edited books Rethinking Social Movements, The Contexts Reader, and the four-volume Social Movements. Goodwin, Jasper, and Francesca Polletta together edited Passionate Politics.

From 2005 to 2007 Jasper and Goodwin edited Contexts magazine, bringing trademark humor to the American Sociological Association’s magazine intended to reach popular audiences. Jasper also used the pen name Harry Green to write a controversial column called “the Fool” at the back of each issue.