Being Oromo in Nairobi’s ‘Little Mogadishu’: Eastleigh’s Ethiopian refugees and their livelihoods

Speaker: Dr Neil Carrier (African Studies Centre, University of Oxford)

RSC Public Seminar Series, Michaelmas Term: Refugee Economies
Conveners: Alexander Betts and Naohiko Omata
In recent academic and policy arenas in forced migration, the issue of how to understand refugees’ economic lives has emerged as one of the most pressing agendas. This seminar series will therefore gather leading scholars who have been working on related issues in order to consolidate the empirical and theoretical knowledge of refugee economies. Speakers will be convened from diverse and inter-disciplinary backgrounds from anthropology, economics, and political science. In addition to knowledge building, this seminar series is intended to initiate nurturing wider networks of researchers working on economic lives of refugees and to establish a common space for exchanging ideas, discussing findings and challenges.

About the speaker
Dr Neil Carrier is Departmental Lecturer in African Anthropology at the African Studies Centre, University of Oxford. Neil is involved in the teaching of the Centre’s MSc in African Studies and also teaches and supervises graduate students in the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology. He has been involved in a wide range of research, mostly focused on the anthropology and history of East Africa and its diaspora. He has been working on a project examining the Somali-dominated Nairobi estate of Eastleigh as part of the Oxford Diasporas Programme team, exploring the historical and cultural underpinnings of Eastleigh’s diaspora-driven economy. Neil also maintains his interest in the topic of Africa and its drug trade which developed out of his earlier research on the stimulant khat, and he has developed this interest in his recently published book ‘African and the War on Drugs’, which he wrote in collaboration with Gernot Klantschnig.