Research

Jeff Pratt's first research was a study of political movements, specifically of the co-existence of Catholicism and Communism in a very polarised Italian town. Out of that emerged a focus on the Catholic Church and its social doctrine, and also a more general interest in the analysis of culture and ideology, some of it published in a 1986 book, The Walled City. In the mid 1980s Jeff took up research on rural transformations, both in terms of the economics of small farmers as they become incorporated into markets and the circuits of capital, and in terms of the cultural transformations which affect very basic concepts, such as time, work, money, the family and nature. The resulting monograph, The Rationality of Rural Life (1994), was the start of an enduring interest in rural society. In the last ten years there have been two further developments. Jeff has worked with a number of graduate students researching migration, ethnicity and racism in Europe (The Politics of Recognizing Difference, 2002), a set of issues which he also teaches in a course on multiculturalism. Jeff has also returned to research on political movements and written a more theoretical study (Class, Nation and Identity, 2003), built up from a series of European case-studies, which analyses class and nationalist politics. This focus has widened through the supervision of a group of students researching the alter-globalisation movement. Over the last 8 years much of his research has concentrated on the growth of alternative food movements, their cultural roots and transformative potential, a topic which brings together his interest in politics, economic anthropology and rural society.

He no longer supervises D.Phil students, the last three were
Tadzio Mueller - Other Worlds, Other Values: Alternative Value Practices in the European Anti-Capitalist Movement  (2006) 

Marianne Meackelberg - Decentralized Network Democracy: Prefiguring, Horizontality and Diversity in the Alter-globalisation Movement (2007)

Jamie Cross - The Social Politics of Mass Production at a Special Economic Zone in South India (2008)