Katie Jones
Katie was born and raised in the United Kingdom. She holds an MSc in Latin American Studies from the University of Oxford’s Latin American Centre and a Bachelor of Arts degree in History and Politics from the University of Warwick.
During her masters, Katie explored the impact of community violence on school dropout in Mexico in her dissertation. She investigated this issue at a macro and micro level, paying close attention to the states of Chihuahua, Zacatecas and Guerrero. She plans to build on this work in the future, with the aim of closing educational divides in such contexts and beyond.
Prior to her studies at Oxford, Katie investigated educational inequalities in Costa Rica and Nicaragua in her undergraduate dissertation. On completing her undergraduate degree, Katie worked and lived in Mexico’s state of Puebla before moving to Costa Rica. She taught English in both countries. While in Costa Rica, she was an active member of a local NGO called Club A, which strove to provide children from an underprivileged neighbourhood with basic education, food and clean water.
During her time in the region, she also interned for C-SPOC – an NGO focused on providing self-sustaining solutions in education, health and enterprise for communities - for whom she completed a research project on how community actors can contribute to the provision of a quality education for all in Costa Rica. She also got involved in a number of other initiatives, in her capacity as Ambassador for Central America and Mexico for the International Fellowship of Rotarian Educators.
Just prior to her masters, Katie worked as an investigator for InSight Crime, a foundation dedicated to the study of organized crime and citizen insecurity in the Americas. She also started to write for the Latin American Bureau, for whom she is currently working on a book about Costa Rica.
Katie will now work on a project with the Inter-American Development Bank that concerns education and technology in Peru, supporting a qualitative research team. Following her time at Oxford, Katie plans to keep working on the closure of educational divides in Latin America, particularly in challenging contexts.
