Cory Rodgers

Dr Cory Rodgers is a social anthropologist researching how aid policies affect human mobility, social identity, and communal relations. His work spans the fields of forced migration and pastoralism studies.

In both Kenya and Lebanon, he has researched the politicization of refugee assistance and the tensions that arise between displaced and host communities. From 2020 to 2023, he was the principal investigator of the AHRC-funded project Social Cohesion as a Humanitarian Objective, which examined humanitarian strategies to promote tolerance and inclusion in contexts of protracted displacement. While working with the Refugee Economies Programme, his research at the Kakuma Refugee Camp (Kenya) explored the influence of changes in aid modality (e.g. in-kind vs voucher vs cash), as well as the informal arrangements through which refugee communities fill gaps in assistance and circumvent formal restrictions on the use of aid.

In the same area of Kenya, Dr Rodgers has conducted extensive research with Turkana pastoralists, highlighting the ‘sedentist biases’ that pervade many rural development policies and undermine the practice of mobility among nomadic communities. His doctoral dissertation, an ethnography on rural development and social change among Turkana communities, was awarded the Prof. David Parkin Prize in Ethnographic Materials from Oxford’s Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology.