Department of Anthropology

Working with students and locals in the field

Women, transport and employment in Africa

Young women in Africa face discrimination as transport users and employees, affecting access to work and education. Increasing their employment in areas like commercial driving and vehicle repair can contribute to women feeling safer using public transport. A research project led by Professor Gina Porter aimed to explore and address these challenges.

The project focused on young women in marginalised areas of three cities: Abuja (Nigeria), Tunis (Tunisia) and Cape Town (South Africa). It had three, interlinked strands: ‘user’ – transport usage, barriers, and access to employment and training – ‘employment’ – experiences in the transport sector – and ‘action research’, which built on findings to create transport-related training.

We employed peer researchers in each area to better understand local context and constraints. They interviewed transport users on-the-go and wrote mobility diaries, raising a range of issues. Our teams then conducted interviews with women on their travel and employment experiences.

Our research led to the creation of gender-sensitive transport skills guidance provided by our NGO collaborator, Transaid. Training was tailored to each city – e.g. a focus on motorcyclists in Abuja, where this is a popular mode of transport. For Cape Town, they ran genderbased awareness training for male taxi drivers, and upskilling in maintenance, customer service and business management for female taxi drivers.

For more on this project’s work in Tunis, see the School of Government and International Affairs section on page 24-25.

Student international fieldwork in Gibraltar

We’re the only UK anthropology department to offer a residential field course to all our undergraduate students. One popular international field course is in Gibraltar, to study its human-primate interactions. Gibraltar is home to the only wild primates in Europe, giving students the opportunity for both social and primatological research. The ‘Gibraltar Apes’ are actually Barbary macaques, a species of monkey that live on the Upper Rock Nature Reserve.

Students stay for one week, collecting data over the first couple days to shape their research questions. Topics they can explore include folklore, Gibraltarian identity, and what the monkeys mean to the people living in and visiting Gibraltar. Some choose to focus on the relationship between the primates and Gibraltar’s tourists, while others decide to focus on solely on the people of Gibraltar, their culture, and their identity. Opportunities for observations include a ceremonial changing of the keys in the town square, the national museum, and many military sites.

Opportunities such as this offer students research-led teaching and hands-on experience, equipping them with the knowledge and skills they need for a successful future in anthropology.

Baby sleep health

We’re one of only a few departments to span not just social and evolutionary anthropology, but also anthropology of health. Some of our most impactful research has been through the Durham Infancy and Sleep Centre, which examines infant and child sleep and parenting behaviour. Our research into infant sleep safety has helped reduce rates of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) and provided health professionals and parents with evidence-based advice that’s made a global impact, including official infant sleep safety guidance in the UK.