Dr Ryan Joseph O'Byrne is a sociocultural anthropologist with more than three years fieldwork experience among South Sudanese communities and refugees in Aotearoa New Zealand, South Sudan, and Uganda. He was awarded a Masters in Cultural Anthropology by Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington in 2012, a PhD in Social Anthropology by University College London (UCL) in 2017, and is presently employed as a Post-Doctoral Researcher in the Firoz Lalji Institute of Africa (FLIA) at The London School of Economics and Political Science (ÐÓ°ÉÂÛ̳).
Dr O'Byrne's PhD fieldwork explored the intersections between evangelical Christianity and local religious systems in the rural South Sudanese community of Pajok while the primary focus of hispost-doctoral research has been examining the connections between migration, resilience, and public authority among South Sudanese refugees in northern Uganda. His Master’s work examined issues of agency, belonging, and cultural (re)production among the South Sudanese diaspora within New Zealand while his present research investigates the role of Christian churches as everyday governance actors within Ugandan refugee settlements, where he continues to undertake ethnographic fieldwork on an annual basis.
His work is published in a range of top ranked peer-reviewed journals, including The Journal of Refugee and Immigrant Studies, The Journal of Refugee Studies, and The Journal of Religion in Africa. He is co-editor of a special issue on vernacular resilience in post-conflict Uganda for Civil Wars and has chapters forthcoming in the edited volumes Informal Settlement in the Global South and Migration, Borders, and Refugees in Africa, both due for publication by Routledge in 2023.