Research projects

The Global Governed? Refugees as Providers of Protection and Assistance

Kate completed a PhD in International Development at the University of Bath in 2016. Her doctoral research in Tanzania highlighted tensions within discursive framings of teenage girlhood and sexuality in development policy and explored their implications for praxis. From 2017 to 2019, Kate worked as a Research Officer for the Refugee Studies Centre at the University of Oxford on the ESRC-funded 'The Global Governed? Refugee-led Protection and Assistance' project, undertaking ethnographic research on community-based social protection in Uganda and Kenya.

Kate’s research interests include theories of agency and empowerment, young people’s sexual and reproductive rights, and the construction of ‘girlhood’ through development narratives. She is particularly interested in exploring how humanitarian organisations engage with the SDG’s ‘Leave No One Behind’ agenda, and the implications of a renewed focus on youth and gender for work with forcibly displaced adolescent girls in East Africa. She is currently working as a researcher for the Overseas Development Institute on the Gender and Adolescence: Global Evidence programme.