Professor Craig Jeffrey
Professor Craig Jeffrey
Tutorial Fellow in Geography
Email: Professor Craig Jeffrey
Teaching
I am responsible for teaching all Human Geography papers at St John's College. At the School of Geography and the Environment in Oxford, I teach introductory courses on Human Geography and International Development, and I am currently planning advanced courses on South Asia, global youth, and geographies of educational inequality across the world. I also supervise graduate students in Geography, Anthropology and International Studies who work on issues such as international development, agrarian change, youth, class politics, and state/society relations. I am keenly interested in questions of diversity within Higher Education and I have been involved in several initiatives that combine teaching, research and community engagement.
Research Interests
My research examines the relationship between education, social change, and the politics of development in India. I have spent 38 months conducting field research in western Uttar Pradesh, India, since 1996, mainly working in Hindi and Urdu. This has included a major research project on the relationship between schooling and inequality in India and a more recent study of how student politics shapes the urban social and political landscape in Uttar Pradesh. I am currently working on a project funded by the USA’s National Science Foundation that examines how the 2007 victory of a low caste political party in Uttar Pradesh is transforming everyday politics in India. Before joining the School of Geography and the Environment in Oxford, I worked as a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh and was an Associate Professor of Geography and International Studies at the University of Washington. I hold affiliate professor positions at the Universities of Washington and Delhi.
Publications
I have written two research monographs. In the first - Degrees Without Freedom? Education, Masculinities and Unemployment in North India (Stanford University Press 2008; with Patricia Jeffery and Roger Jeffery) – I critique mainstream approaches to the study of education within Development Studies through reference to the experiences of unemployed youth in Uttar Pradesh, many of whom have spent over twenty years in formal education. The second book - Timepass: Waiting, Micropolitics and the Indian Middle Classes (Stanford University Press 2010) – examines unemployed young men in urban Uttar Pradesh and their role in social and political change in north India. I am also co-editor of Telling Young Lives: Portraits in Global Youth (Temple University Press 2008; with Jane Dyson) which uses the stories of thirteen young people to reflect on issues of globalization, education, inequality, and changing family relationships across the world. I am co-editor, with Jane Dyson, of a new book series on Global Youth with Temple University Press. A comprehensive list of my recent publications is available at my School of Geography website.
