Staff profile

Jack’s background is in International Development. He obtained his BA (2014), MA (2015) and PhD (2019) from the Department of Political and Cultural Studies at Swansea University. Jack was a Research Fellow and later an Honorary Research Associate at Swansea from March 2019. He has also held positions at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (2020) and Canterbury Christ Church University (2021). Jack joined the Department of Anthropology at Durham University in February 2022, where he works as Postdoctoral Research Associate on the project ‘ALIVEAfrica: Animals, Livelihoods and Wellbeing in Africa’, funded by the European Commission.

Within the ALIVEAfrica project, Jack leads Case Study 2: Hunting Livelihoods in Sierra Leone, which focuses on hunting economies in rural and peri-urban areas of the country. This follows on from his previous work exploring rural agricultural lives and livelihoods in Liberia and Sierra Leone. This work examined the impact of improving transport infrastructure and services, focusing on how connecting isolated communities to the road network contributes to rural development in the areas of agriculture, education, employment, community cohesion, and health. He has also studied how improved rural-urban connectivity achieved in the post-war period in these countries has allowed rural women, previously tied down by domestic or farm activities, to participate more fully within the scope of market relations of production.

• West Africa, Liberia, Sierra Leone
• Rural Livelihoods and Development
• Hunting
• Urban and Rural Transport
• Community Access
• Civil War and Post-War Reconstruction