Rivke Jaffe

Work

Jaffe's work focuses on the intersections of the urban and the political. A particular concern is the understanding of how power is spatialized and affects inequality in urban communities. Her work is derived from an interdisciplinary perspective, combining methods and approaches derived from anthropology, humanities as well as geography and other social sciences. She is interested in how urban problems such as poverty, crime and environmental degradation are linked to social differentiation along lines of ethnicity, class and gender. This includes questions such as how urban policy, market forces and social movements influence the construction, reproduction and transformation of inequalities; how our experience of and communication about urban exclusion and solidarity is affected by popular culture, such as music, video clips, and street art; and how contemporary cities are shaped by the (colonial) past.

In her inaugural lecture as professor of Cities, Politics and Culture, held at 2 June 2017, Jaffe argued for a combination of methods from humanities and social sciences, such as long-term ethnography and cultural analysis, to develop new understandings of the political and the urban.

Career

Jaffe studied Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University, where she also wrote a Ph.D. dissertation on urban environmental problems and community involvement in Kingston, under the supervision of Peter Nas. Together with later fieldwork in Jamaica as well as Curaçao her dissertation formed the basis for the monograph Concrete Jungles. After writing her dissertation Jaffe held positions as postdoctoral researcher at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) and lecturer at Leiden University and University of the West Indies. From 2012 she worked as assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam, where she was appointed associate professor in 2013. Over her career Jaffe has been awarded various research grants, including a NWO VENI grant for the research project Between the Street and the State: Crime and Citizenship in Kingston, Jamaica, a NWO VIDI and Aspasia grant for a five-year research project on The Politics of Security: The Impacts of Public-Private Security Assemblages on Governance and Citizenship, and an ERC Starting grant for the five-year research project Transforming Citizenship through Hybrid Governance: The Impacts of Public-Private Security Assemblages. She is web editor and editorial board member of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, co-editor of the European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies and editorial board member of [[American Anthropologist].

In 2016 Jaffe was appointed professor of Cities, Politics and Culture.

In 2014 Jaffe was elected member of the Young Academy at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Trivia

• Jaffe's father is the astronomer Walter Jaffe, known for the Jaffe profile.
• Jaffe is also known as DJ Sunshine