Jack Jenkins

Jack Jenkins is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Sociology and a Postdoctoral Associate at St Cross College. An ethnographer, he works on livelihoods, illegal economies, mobility and public authority in West Africa, and has carried out fieldwork in Liberia and Sierra Leone since 2015. 

His current research examines how illegal cross-border trade is organised and governed in the borderland where Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea meet, looking at how authority is exercised and negotiated around the region’s border crossings. It speaks to the sociology of illegal markets, particularly questions of trust and cooperation where agreements cannot be enforced by law, and to wider debates on governance and public authority in African borderlands. 

Prior to joining the University of Oxford, Jack was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Durham University, where he led an ethnographic case study of hunting and bushmeat economies in Sierra Leone for the ERC-funded project ‘AliveAfrica: Animals, Livelihoods and Wellbeing in Africa’. His bushmeat research has appeared in The Conversation and Scientific American, and was featured in a 2026 episode of NHK’s science documentaryseries Frontiers. He was also Principal Investigator on a VREF-funded comparative study of children’s mobility in Ghana and Liberia. 

Jack received his PhD in International Development from Swansea University in 2019, with a thesis on motorcycle track construction and agrarian livelihoods in forest communities in northern Liberia. He is an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Research interests: Illegal markets; public authority and governance; informal economies; mobility and transport; West Africa (Sierra Leone and Liberia).