Cecile Jackson

Biographical Information
Cecile Jackson, Professor of Development Studies, University of East Anglia.

"Two strands of work define my recent research concerns; a line of thinking about epistemologies for interdisciplinary development studies research, and substantively, and interest in the ways in which well-being is not simply an individual attribute – of capabilities and functionings – but a profoundly social relational phenomena. This builds on my earlier work on gender and poverty, and on my commitment to gender analysis, which is centrally about social relations rather than gender categories, as a lens through which to understand social change. Together with colleagues working with experimental economics methods (Bereket Kebede, Arjan Verschoor, Vegard Iversen and Alistair Munroe) we designed a game to test Sen’s cooperative conflict theory, which aims to explain how gender differentiated wellbeing outcomes are patterned by intrahousehold bargaining processes, and tested the game in eastern Uganda with married couples managing and allocating  money. I followed up a sample of the game participants to collect detailed information on their conjugal cooperations, conflicts and their experience of the game, and this work was the basis of the ESRC/DFID funded project currently underway. The methods we developed are also the basis of the larger comparative project, just begun, with the same team and Dr Nitya Rao, as a means to study norms of conjugal fairness in a range of societies – Nigeria, India, Ethiopia and Burkina Faso. "