Jeanne Bouyat

Jeanne Bouyat is an Oxpo postdoctoral research fellow based at the Department of Politics and International Relations (DPIR) and Nuffield college in Oxford, and a research fellow at the Centre de Recherches Internationales (CERI) of Sciences Po Paris. She defended her PhD in Political Science at Sciences Po in March 2021, under the cosupervision of Richard Banégas and Claire Bénit-Gbaffou.

Her dissertation is entitled: The school boundaries of the national community. Institutional xenophobia, site effects, and counter-hegemonic education in high schools of low-income areas of Johannesburg. It explores processes of nation-building and state-making in contemporary post-apartheid South Africa through a focus on xenophobia - and the making of the relationship towards foreignness more broadly - in the schooling institution. It is based on eleven months of fieldwork which includes:
- A comparative research in seven high schools located in four low-income areas of Johannesburg through interviewing school staff and learners, administrating questionnaires, as well as a coteaching and ethnographic fieldwork in a Sowetan school.
- Interviews with officials in the administrations of the Departments of Basic Education and of Home Affairs; and the analysis of policy instruments and legislative texts.
- Interviews with lawyers and participant observations of mobilisations by migrant organisations around immigrant learners’ access to school.
Her PhD was sponsored by the French national research centre (CNRS) with the support of the French Institute of South Africa (IFAS).

Jeanne took part in two collective research projects:
- Practices of the State in Urban Governance, coordinated by Claire Bénit-Gbaffou,sponsored by the South African national research agency (SA-NRF)  hosted at the Centre for Urbanism and the Built Environment Studies (CUBES), University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.
- The Social Life of Identity Documents in Africa, coordinated by Séverine Awenengo Dalberto and Richard Banégas, sponsored by the French national research agency (ANR) hosted at the CERI.

Previously, Jeanne was a visiting scholar at the Institute for African Studies (IAS), Columbia University ; and at the Centre for Urbanism and the Built Environment Studies (CUBES), University of the Witwatersrand.

A full list of her publications is available here.