Dawn Chatty is Deputy Director of the Refugee Studies Centre, Queen Elizabeth House, University of Oxford. She is a social anthropologist whose ethnographic interests lie in the Middle East, particularly with nomadic pastoral tribes. Her research interests include a number of development issues, such as conservation-induced displacement, tribal resettlement, modern technology and social change, and gender and development. She is both an academic anthropologist and a practitioner, having carefully developed her career in universities in the United States, Lebanon, Syria and Oman, as well as with a number of development agencies such as the UNDP, UNICEF, FAO, and IFAD.
After taking her undergraduate degree with honours at UCLA, she took a Master's degree in Social Studies and Development from the Institute of Social Studies, the Hague, Netherlands. She returned to UCLA to take her PhD in Social Anthropology under the late Professor Hilda Kuper. She has come to Oxford from Oman, where she was Associate Professor of Anthropology at Sultan Qaboos University.
Among her recent publications are: Mobile Pastoralists: Development Planning and Social Change in Oman (Columbia University Press, 1996), Organizing Women: Informal and Formal Women's Groups in the Middle East (ed. with Annika Rabo, Berg Publishers, 1997) and Conservation and Mobile Indigenous Peoples: Displacement, Forced Settlement and Sustainable Development (ed. with Marcus Colchester, Berghahn, 2002).
She is currently examining the impact which conservation schemes have on the livelihoods of non-settled peoples, be they nomadic pastoralists, swidden farmers, hunters and gatherers or other mobile societies. Focussing on the recent animal reintroduction schemes in Oman, Syria and Jordan, she prepared a paper to contribute to the international conference, Displacement, Forced Settlement and Conservation which she organized at St. Anne's College, University of Oxford, September 9-11th, 1999. In April 2002 she organized a follow-up conference in Wadi Dana, Jordan, entitled Mobile Peoples and Conservation: Bridging the Disciplinary Divide. From this conference came the Dana Declaration on Mobile Peoples and Conservation.