Kerilyn Schewel: Rethinking the Links between Climate Change, Development, and Human Mobility: Insights from Rural Ethiopia

Kerilyn Schewel will present as part of the Carolina Population Center’s 2023-2024 Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series.

Schewel is the co-director of the Duke Program on Climate-Related Migration, a Lecturing Fellow at the Duke Center for International Development and a Senior Researcher at the International Migration Institute.

Trained as a sociologist, her research to examines the root causes of human migration and immobility, with an emphasis on the themes of gender, youth, education, rural development, and climate change. She has carried out extensive qualitative and mixed-methods fieldwork in Ethiopia. Her book, Moved by Modernity: How Development Shapes Migration in Rural Ethiopia, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. 

At the Duke Center for International Development, Kerilyn teaches on migration policy and development and leads Rural Development and the Capability to Stay, a research project funded by the Social Science Research Council. She has also worked with the United States Agency for International Development, International Labour Organization, International Organization for Migration, and the Joint Research Center of the European Commission on policy-oriented publications and dialogue.

Kerilyn holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Amsterdam (2019), an MSc in Migration Studies from the University of Oxford (2014), and a BA in Psychology from the University of Virginia (2009). She has held visiting researcher positions at the University of Addis Ababa and Princeton University.