School of Geographical and Earth Sciences

Dr Deborah Bryceson

Deborah F Bryceson
  • Reader (School of Geographical and Earth Sciences)

email: Deborah.Bryceson@glasgow.ac.uk


Deborah Bryceson's long-standing interest in rural and urban areas has involved extensive research into the interaction of livelihood, mobility and settlement in East Africa and elsewhere on the African continent. Adopting an inter-institutional perspective, her analyses of people's work and leisure time pursuits trace how economic transactions, spatial decision-making and social relations are embedded in the interaction of households, states, markets and community networks. Her early work spanned the topics of African food security, staple food markets, agricultural policy, rural transport and gender divisions of labour. During the 1990s, she pioneered the comparative study of deagrarianization processes in Africa, focussing on rural income diversification and associated household and community responses. More recently, she has concentrated her research on urban economies, urban growth and mobility patterns. Her current research topics are: 1) the interaction between mining and urbanization in Sub-Saharan Africa and 2) the influence of Swahili creole culture in East African urban history and politics

Deborah Bryceson holds bachelor and master degrees in geography from the University of Dar es Salaam and a DPhil (sociology) from Oxford University. She began her career as a researcher at the Bureau of Resource Assessment and Land Use Planning at the University of Dar es Salaam. Thereafter she taught development studies at the Architectural Association, London. She worked at the Afrika-studiecentrum at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands between 1992 and 2005. After moving back to the United Kingdom, she taught at the University of Birmingham and has been involved in research collaboration with the Geography Institute at the University of Copenhagen as well as the Nordic Africa Institute, Uppsala, Sweden. She is a Principal at The Policy Practice and a Research Associate at the African Studies Centre and the International Gender Studies Centre at Oxford University. She has done research consultancies with a number of international agencies including: the International Labour Office, Food and Agriculture Organization, World Bank, UNCTAD, UNRISD, DfID, DANIDA, CARE International and the Tanzanian government. She joined the University of Glasgow in 2009.

Jump to: 2012 | 2011 | 2010 | 2009
Number of items: 13.

2012

Bryceson, D.F. (2012) Discovery and denial: social science theory and interdisciplinarity in African studies. African Affairs, 111 (443). pp. 281-302. ISSN 0001-9909 (doi:10.1093/afraf/ads001)

2011

Bryceson, D. (2011) Birth of a market town in Tanzania: towards narrative studies of Urban Africa. Journal of Eastern African Studies, 5 (2). pp. 274-293. ISSN 1753-1055 (doi:10.1080/17531055.2011.571389)

2010

Bryceson, D.F., and Jønsson, J.B. (2010) Gold digging careers in rural East Africa: small-scale miners’ livelihood choices. World Development, 38 (3). pp. 379-392. ISSN 0305-750X (doi:10.1016/j.worlddev.2009.09.003)

Bryceson, D. (2010) Swahili creolization: the case of Dar es Salaam. In: Cohen, R. and Toninato, P. (eds.) The Creolization Reader: Studies in Mixed Identities and Cultures. Series: Routledge student readers (5). Routledge, London, UK, pp. 364-375. ISBN 9780415498548

Bryceson, D.F., Jønsson, J.B., and Sherrington, R. (2010) Miners' magic: artisanal mining, the albino fetish and murder in Tanzania. Journal of Modern African Studies, 48 (3). pp. 353-382. ISSN 0022-278X (doi:10.1017/S0022278X10000303)

Bryceson, D.F., and Mwaipopo, R. (2010) Rural-urban transitions in Northwestern Tanzania’s mining frontier. In: Agergaard, J., Fold, N. and Gough, K.V. (eds.) Rural-Urban Dynamics: Livelihoods, Mobility and Markets in African and Asian Frontiers. Series: Routledge Studies in Human Geography (29). Routledge, London, UK, pp. 158-174. ISBN 9780415475624

Bryceson, D.F., and Yankson, P. (2010) Frontier mining settlements: livelihood promises and predicaments. In: Agergaard, J., Fold, N. and Gough, K.V. (eds.) Rural-Urban Dynamics: Livelihoods, Mobility and Markets in African and Asian Frontiers. Series: Routledge Studies in Human Geography (29). Routledge, London, UK, pp. 189-197. ISBN 9780415475624

Bryceson, D. (2010) Dar es Salaam as a 'Harbour of Peace' in East Africa: tracing the role of Creolized urban ethnicity in nation-state formation. In: Beall, J., Guha-Khasnobis, B. and Kanbur, K. (eds.) Urbanization and Development: Multidisciplinary Perspectives. Series: UNU-WIDER Studies in Development Economics . Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 219-234. ISBN 9780199590148

2009

Bryceson, D.F. (2009) Sub-Saharan Africa’s vanishing peasantries and the specter of a global food crisis. Monthly Review, 61 (3). pp. 48-62. ISSN 0027-0520

Bryceson, D.F., Gough, K.V., Rigg, J., and Agergaard, J. (2009) Critical commentary. The World Development Report 2009. Urban Studies, 46 (4). pp. 723-738. ISSN 0042-0980 (doi:10.1177/0042098009102371)

Rigg, J., Bebbington, A., Gough, K.V., Bryceson, D.F. , Agergaard, J., Fold, N., and Tacoli, C. (2009) The World Development Report 2009 'reshapes economic geography': geographical reflections. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 34 (2). pp. 128-136. ISSN 0020-2754 (doi:10.1111/j.1475-5661.2009.00340.x)

Jønsson, J.B., and Bryceson, D.F. (2009) Rushing for gold: mobility and small-scale mining in East Africa. Development and Change, 40 (2). pp. 249-279. ISSN 0012-155X (doi:10.1111/j.1467-7660.2009.01514.x)

Bryceson, D.F. (2009) The urban melting pot in East Africa: ethnicity and urban growth in Kampala and Dar es Salaam. In: Locatelli, F. and Nugent, P. (eds.) African Cities: Competing Claims on Urban Spaces. Series: African-Europe Group for Interdisciplinary Studies (3). Brill, Leiden, Netherlamds, pp. 242-260. ISBN 9789004162648

This list was generated on Thu May 24 16:34:01 2012 BST.

Bryceson, D.F. and MacKinnon, D. 2010-2013. Urban growth and poverty in mining Africa, £648,894 (ESRC/DfID 167-25-0488. Co-Investigators: C.U. Rodrigues (African Studies Centre Lisbon), K. Gough (Loughborough University).

  • Patricia Campbell (PhD candidate)