Rate My Professor Jane Dyson

Professor Jane Dyson is Professor in Social Geography and Development Geography in the School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Faculty of Science, at the University of Melbourne. She received her PhD from the University of Cambridge, where her doctoral research examined life in a high-altitude village in the Indian Himalayas. After completing her doctorate, Dyson taught and conducted research at the University of Washington and the University of Oxford. Her academic career at the University of Melbourne encompasses ethnographic fieldwork in the Indian Himalayas since 2002, focusing on social geography, cultural anthropology, and development studies. Her research investigates youth agency, gender dynamics, work, education, politics, and social transformation among young people in remote Himalayan communities.

Dyson's key publication is the monograph Working Childhoods: Youth, Agency and the Environment in India, published by Cambridge University Press in 2014, which draws on her long-term research on children's everyday work. Other significant works include 'Viable lives: Life beyond survival in rural North India' (Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2023, with Craig Jeffrey), 'Building viabilities: youth social action in the Indian Himalayas' (2023), 'Hunger for change: Student food insecurity in Australia' (2022), 'Viable geographies' (Progress in Human Geography, 2022, with Craig Jeffrey), 'Reformist agency: young women, gender, and change in India' (Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2022), and 'Fragments for the Future: Selective Urbanism in Rural North India' (Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2021). Her scholarship has been cited over 2,000 times according to Google Scholar. Dyson extends her impact through public engagement, directing and producing award-winning ethnographic films on youth and social change in the Himalayas: Lifelines (2014), Spirit (2019, winner of three Shortie Film Festival awards), and Home (2022). These contributions highlight her influence on studies of youth, development, and inequality in South Asia.