Zoë Johnson was eight when her teacher parents took her on a nine-month round the world backpacking adventure. The experience influenced her understanding of our shared humanity and began to shape her life passion and vision for a future career helping address social injustices of global inequalities. 

Zoë is a second year MPhil student in Development Studies at Oxford’s Department of International Development (ODID). Her research critically explores how young women who own coffee houses in urban Ethiopia define their identities, their aspirations, and their relationships to ‘development’. Zoë conducted her fieldwork in Wukro, a small but rapidly growing city in the northern Ethiopian region of Tigray. 

Over the last decade, Wukro has seen an explosion in the number of coffee houses, due in part to the growing economy, the changing nature of work, shifting gender relations, and the developmental state’s decision to make Wukro a ‘conference centre’. Coffee houses are an interesting microcosm in which to investigate larger forces of change and ‘development’ in Ethiopia because they represent a nexus between tradition and modernity, childhood and adulthood, and subjugation and empowerment. While the women working in the coffee houses represent just one small and heterogeneous group living out the realities of this period of change in Ethiopia, their stories can nonetheless contribute to our understandings of the gendered dimensions of ‘youth’ and ‘progress’ in Africa.

Born and raised in Vancouver, Zoë holds a BSc in Global Resource Systems from the University of British Columbia. She studied globalisation, urbanisation, and international development through the lens of food systems, with a regional focus on South Asia. Before coming to Oxford, Zoë worked as the Program Coordinator for UBC’s Himalaya programme, as editorial assistant at Navdanya in India, and at a host of other non-governmental organisations. Her interest in urban social inequalities has also led her to Oxford Urbanists where she is Programs and Partnerships Director, indicating her firm commitment to issues of development not only as an academic but also as a practitioner. 

While she writes up her thesis she finds her thoughts turning back closer to home where urban poverty and inequality are pressing problems. Zoë’s international development experience will help her make a more meaningful contribution locally working in impoverished areas such as Vancouver’s Downtown (DTES), and toward improving immigrant and refugee services in Canada. 

The CCSF and MLT are proud to award Zoë our first ever Tammy Chen Scholarship given in memory of Tammy who received a CCSF award in 2015 and whose life was tragically cut short whilst completing a PhD in Development Studies at the University of Cambridge. Zoë shares Tammy Chen’s commitment to academics and passion for social justice and will go on to use these attributes and her knowledge for the betterment of humanity – as Tammy was endeavouring to do.