Professor Patricia Daley

Professor Patricia Daley is Professor of the Human Geography of Africa. She is also the Helen Morag Fellow in Geography at Jesus College, Oxford, where she served as Vice-Principal from 2018 to 2021. She was the University Assessor (2015-2016) and co-founder of the Oxford University Black and Minority Ethnic staff network. She was elected to and served on the University Council from 2021 to 2025, and acted as elected representative on the Education Committee, Planning and Resources Allocation Committee, and the General Purposes Committee. She is also a member of the University’s Staff Employment Review Panel.

Her previous academic appointments were at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, Loughborough University and Pembroke College, Oxford. She has taught a range of human geography topics, as well as specialist courses on African societies and environments. At Jesus College she held the administrative offices of Tutor for Admissions (1999-2002) and Tutor for Women (1998-2004). She has sat on various College committees, including the Academic Committee, Disciplinary Panel, and the Accommodation, Catering and Conference Committee (ACC), and chaired the Staff Liaison Committee. As Vice-Principal, she chaired the Personnel and ACC committees and the Equality and Diversity Working Group. In May-June 2024, she held a Visiting fellowship at the University of Turin.

In the past four years, she has been invited to give keynote research presentations at the following conferences: Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence Conference, University of Bayreuth (2021); Africa Studies of Italy Conference at the University of Urbino, Italy (2022); African Studies Group Annual Conference, University of Melbourne (2022); The 20th Society for the Study of Ethnic Relations and International Migration (ETMU), University of Jyväskylä (2023); and with Amber Murrey, The Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography Lecture at the Annual International Conference of the Royal Geographical Society/ Institute of British Geographers (2021). Invited special lectures include: the Gregory Lecture, University of Southampton (2023), and the Department of Social Policy Annual Lecture, LSE (2024). Her invited participation in panel discussions includes at the University of Antwerp (2023) and Trondheim University (2023). In 2024, she co-hosted writing workshops for young academics at the University of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and in Yaoundé, Cameroon.

With regards to her contributions to research on topics relating to communities in the UK, Patricia presented a paper on researching reparations and reparative justice at Birkbeck College’s Social Science festival in 2025; on the economics of reparation at Bristol Festival of Economics in 2021; on 'Black Women in the Academy' at the online book launch of Jan Etienne (ed.) Communities of Activism: Black Women, Higher Education and the Politics of Representation in which she has a chapter, and at an online meeting on "Racism, Under/Achievement and Decolonising Education" for the community organization WomanzVue. She has also contributed to schoolteachers' fora on decolonizing the geography school curriculum. In 2021, she did an online presentation on Border abolition: Rethinking asylum in the post-liberal world at the OKRE Development Rooms event at Cannes Film Festival in partnership with Brown Girls Doc Mafia and Think-Film Impact Productions. In recognition of her commitment to the engagement of scholarship with activism, in 2014, she received the James Blaut Award from the Socialist and Critical Geography Speciality Group of the Association of American Geographers. In 2020 and 2021, Patricia was included on the Black Power List as one of the most influential Black persons in the UK.

Professor Daley currently sits on the Interview Panel for the Wellcome Trust Discovery Award. She is the Place and the Environment section editor of OUP's Oxford Intersection: Racism by Context. She has recently completed a 6-year-stint as co-editor of the Environmental and Planning C: Society and Space. She was also a member of the Editorial Advisory Board for the journal Gender, Place and Culture a member of the interdisciplinary advisory board of the International Relations journal, St Antony's International Review; and a peer reviewer for a number of Geography and African Studies journals, including Political Geography, Third World Quarterly, CODESRIA, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, Journal of Southern African Studies, Journal of Refugee Studies, and the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. She has also peer reviewed grants for the ESRC/DfID, NORFACE, SSRC, Leverhulme and British Academy.

In addition to academic fora, Professor Daley speaks at community events, such as at the 2017 Africa Liberation Day in Birmingham; the 2018 Black History Month Windrush Celebrations in Barton, Oxford; and as part of the 2019 Windrush celebrations at the Museum of Oxford. Her media work includes acting as a consultant for an internationally screened documentary film on the genocide in Rwanda (Rwanda: The Forgotten Tribe); and presenting her work at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival organised by OKRE.org. She participated as a panelist at the British Film Institute post-film discussions of The Past is not the Future: Walter Rodney Student Years (2018); The Young Marx (2019) and The life and Legacy of Marcus Garvey (2022). She has commentated on African politics on Al Jazeera and the BBC World Service. She is a regular contributor to the online newsletter Pambazuka News. Org.

Her current voluntary work includes membership of the of the Advisory Council of the Carnegie Africa Diaspora Fellowship Programme, and chair of the Board of Trustees for Fahamu Trust Ltd - a pan-African social justice movement building organization that publishes the online newsletter PambazukaNews. Previous community engagements include being a Member of Council and Trustee of the British Academy Institute in Eastern Africa (2012 –2016); member of Independent Advisory Group on Country Information of the Independent Chief Inspector of Border and Immigration; and a Committee Member and Equality Officer for the Oxford Branch of the University College Union.

Professor Daley’s principal research interests can be grouped under four themes: (1).The political economy of population migration and settlement (forced migration, identity politics and citizenship); (2) The intersection of space, gender, militarism, sexual violence and peace (feminist geo-politics); (3) Racial hierarchies and violence (geographies of racialization and coloniality using Critical Race Theory and decolonizing methodologies); (4) The relationship between conservation, resource extraction, and rural livelihoods (political ecology). The geographical loci of research are East and Central Africa, and the UK.

Research Projects

• Citizenship and Belonging in Tanzania
  The book project arising from this research is ‘Becoming Tanzanian: Burundian Refugees and Citizenship in Tanzania’ and is to be published by James Currey. The key task of the book is to explore how new networked relationships between global capitalism, international humanitarian assistance, and local political elites affect those who have been forcedly displaced and those considered to be indigenous citizens. The book questions the ability of external humanitarian agencies to finding lasting and humane solutions to refugee problems and shows how the shifting policy solutions promoted by the international community have contributed to the marginalization and securitization of former refugees and other mobile peoples in Africa.
• Black Body Politics: Social Hierarchies and Violence
  The project addresses the intersectionality of race, class and gender in Africa and the African diaspora, using sexual violence against black women as a means of exploring contemporary eugenics and genocidal practices. It examines the bio-political crises in contemporary Africa and the diaspora that arise out of intersecting insecurities and the social and moral deficit caused by neo-liberal capitalism.
• Global Africans: Decolonizing Geographies of Migration, Citizenship, and Marginality
  This project seeks to engage with Africans on the continent and in the diaspora on the spatial and scalar strategies they have developed to overcome marginality within the spaces in which they reside, even when they have formal citizenship; how they transcend constraining structures that perceive them as non-citizens - living within, but existing without. The project explores whether the African experience can offer insights into the multi-scalarity and problematic nature of citizenship and on the politics of belonging pertinent to the 21st century.

Undergraduate teaching

Professor Daley lectures on ' Racialization, Borders and Migration' for the Preliminary Examination; gives the Final Honour School core lectures on difference for the Space, Place and Society paper; on institutional subjects for the Geographical Thought paper; and on indigenous ontologies and community conservation for the Environmental Geography paper. She also co-teaches with Dr Amber Murrey the option paper 'Critical Development Geographies'' and gives human geography tutorials for the core papers to Jesus College students.

Postgraduate teaching

Professor Daley lectures on decolonizing conservation and decolonizing methodologies for the postgraduate programmes.

Current Graduate Research Students

Recent Graduate Research Students