Welcome to Dr Jane Battersby (pictured below), who joins the department from UCT’s African Centre for Cities where she has been leading the urban food cluster. Jane’s work over the last 13 years has used food as a lens to understand wider issues of governance, planning, health and justice.

Jane’s work on urban food security, food systems and food systems governance is globally acknowledged, having won the 2017 Premio Daniel Carasso for her work on sustainable food systems and worked in consultancy and advisory roles for a number of UN Agencies and local and provincial governments.

Although her position at the African Centre for Cities was a research position, Jane has always been committed to teaching. She has taught EGS4039S (Urban Food Security) in the EGS department since 2008, taught for a number of years on the EBE Faculty’s Social Infrastructures course and recently completed a Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence fellowship in the US. She says of the relationship between teaching and research, “I fundamentally believe that good teaching must be informed by active research, but it is also my experience that my research perspective and practices have been shaped by experiences while teaching. The work of an academic is to connect research and teaching personally, and for students.”

When not working, you can either find Jane running on the mountain or running after her kids.