Where Research Meets Impact: An Education in Systems, Power & Place
Jennifer’s academic foundation is anchored by a PhD in Social Anthropology focused on peace, power, and infrastructure in conflict-affected regions. Her research in Nigeria’s Niger Delta examined how localized peace is built through corporate systems, spatial governance, and everyday resilience. This work complements broader training in international security, urban resilience, sustainability, and conflict resolution, shaped by advanced degrees and programs from the Santa Fe Institute, Duke CE, and the University of Cape Town. Across her studies, Jennifer brings an interdisciplinary lens to systems, place, and social transformation.
PhD in Anthropology, University of Basel, Switzerland
Dissertation: In Search of Peace: Petro Peace in the Niger Delta
What if peace isn’t just the absence of violence but something built, lived, and managed by people navigating impossible conditions? My PhD research explored this question through over a decade of ethnographic work in Nigeria’s Niger Delta, a region shaped by oil wealth, conflict, and environmental harm. I developed the concept of Petro Peace to describe how corporations produce fragile, selective calm through compounds, infrastructure, security systems, and governance routines. This work challenges conventional ideas of peace, showing it as a spatial, material, and lived reality - one that reveals both resilience and the deep inequalities embedded in extractive systems.
Master of Arts in International Policy, Middlebury Institute of International Studies
Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology, University of Colorado, Boulder
EDUCATION
Santa Fe Institute - Urban Transformation, Global Summer School on Urban Sustainability, a month- long course with globally dispersed experts that focused on urban design, transformation, and resilience
Duke CE (Corporate Education) - Business, MBA program that provided accelerated learning on key business concepts and strategies
Development Policy Management Institute - Design, Certificate program on partnership, design thinking, and strategy design
University of Cape Town - Conflict Resolution, Certificate program on international mediation and conflict resolution