Ben Jones joins the Centre of African Studies as an Associate Professor
Ben will be working on the 'Multiple Waterscapes in Urban Ghana' research project. He brings long-term experience as an ethnographer, with a particular focus on local level institutions in Africa, and the part they play in social change.
Ben Jones with Jimmy Ezra Okello, a member of the Citizen Ethnography Collective. You can see a film here about his experiences at university in Uganda. You can also read a recent paper from their work from Ngora Town in eastern Uganda.
Ben has written about youth, Pentecostalism, NGOs, local government and, more recently, village savings groups. His work focuses mostly on the Teso region of eastern Uganda. He brings recent experience working on two British Academy-funded projects on youth, education and work in rural Uganda. In these project he has been working collaboratively with young Ugandans. They have undertaken detailed ethnographic work together, published papers in leading journals and are documenting their work together in films and on social media.
Ben and his Ugandan colleagues are currently working with Northwestern University using ethnographic approaches to understand development interventions in two refugee camps in western Uganda. He is also supporting Tufts University on a new project on agro-pastoralism in Uganda and Kenya under conditions of climate change. In partnership with the Busara Centre for Behavioural Economics in Nairobi, and the University of East Anglia, Ben is also working on a two-year British Academy funded project, led by Dr. Ben Eyre, looking at how the treatment of enumerators – precariously employed young people who do survey work in major development interventions – shapes the quality of data.
Ben is on the editorial board of the journal Africa.