RPCV Courtney Bower joins the Ukraine Case Studies

Courtney Bower (Ukraine 2016-19)

The Ukraine Case Studies Team is delighted to be joined by Courtney Bower, a Ph.D. candidate in regional science at Cornell University and a Senior Fellow at the Portulans Institute. Courtney’s research examines technological resilience and regional innovation systems. Related topics of his research include the circular economy, post-war reconstruction, infrastructure policy, and Black Sea spatial imaginaries. Before attending Cornell, Courtney completed a tour of service as a United States Peace Corps Volunteer in western Ukraine.

Courtney joins the research team for the Ukraine Case Studies project to investigate technological resilience from a regional perspective. His work seeks to understand how Ukrainian regions will bounce back or bounce forward in response to wartime shocks across four dimensions: innovation, human capital, digital access, and ICT infrastructure. His study of technological resilience in Ukraine will be one of the embedded case studies of our larger project, and in line with another future-oriented project, which is Lisa Chernenko’s work on post-war processes for rehumanising the enemy that is tied to her doctoral research at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII).

The Ukraine Case Studies Project is a collaborative project of the Portulans Institute, and several units at the University of Oxford, including the Saïd Business School, the GCSCC of the Oxford Martin School, and the OII.

An overview of the project is at: https://billdutton.me/about-2/the-ukraine-case-studies/.

A more detailed biographical sketch of Courtney Bower is on the Portulans website at: https://portulansinstitute.org/team/courtney-bower/