Dr Cory Rodgers is an anthropologist based at the University of Oxford’s Department of International Development (ODID). His work bridges the fields of migration, refugee and pastoralism studies, with a regional focus on eastern Africa.

At Oxford’s Refugee Studies Centre (RSC), he is the principal investigator of the project “Social Cohesion as a Humanitarian Objective (?)“, which is a critical study of policies and interventions targeting refugee-host relations in contexts of protracted displacement. Since 2015, he has worked primarily in Turkana County in north-western Kenya, where he has documented the politicisation of a ‘host community’ identity among Kenyans living in the vicinity of the Kakuma refugee camp. 

He also leads a collaborative project titled “Re-imagining Development for Mobile Peoples“, which investigates how mainstream development policies influence accommodate, exclude or otherwise influence the livelihoods and lifestyles of mobile peoples, including pastoralists, Traveller communities, and other nomadic and peripatetic peoples for whom mobility is essential to cultural, economic and social life. His doctoral research was a study of changing identities in Turkana, Kenya, including a deepening rift between a growing urban demographic and the rural pastoralist majority in the countryside.

Link to publications:  https://www.rsc.ox.ac.uk/people/cory-rodgers