Chinelo L. Njaka, Ph.D. (she/her/hers) is a social researcher and multimedia maker-artist (primarily textiles, fibre, and photography).
Chinelo L. Njaka, PhD (she/her/hers) is a social researcher and multimedia maker-artist (primarily textiles, fibre, and photography).
She is also the Founder and Director of Peckham Rights!, a not-for-profit organisation that creatively addresses systemic racism(s) and champions everyday human rights for the people of Peckham, London and beyond.
Njaka earned her PhD in Sociology from the University of Manchester. Her areas of expertise are race, racism(s), and racialisation; with particular focus on how understandings of race on a societal level are shaped and influenced by the ideas, communications, and actions of state and institutional bodies, and through organisations at the community (e.g., civil society and voluntary and community sector) level. Her broad areas of interest also include the African Diaspora/people of African descent, Critical Mixed Race Studies, qualitative methods, creative research, health and health promotion, human rights, and craft/creative practices.
Njaka is also interested in current forms of antiracism activism and shifts in ‘race talk’, especially in the wake of the 2020 police murder of George Floyd in the United States. Bringing the strands race and craft together, she is currently working with the Crafts Council on various research and consultation projects around race and racism within the crafts sector.
Her current research areas explore the intersection of race and craft in the European/North American contexts, as well as craft in ‘non-Western’ contexts with specific focus on African and African-diaspora ethnic communities.
Currently, she is working with the collection at the Horniman Museum and Gardens to examine Igbo and Nigerian textile and fibre arts, as well as the museum’s Nancy Stanfield collection, which consists of objects and photography from pre-Biafra War Nigeria (1946-1967).
She is also researching Black quilters and quilting within the African, UK/European, and North American contexts, examining the themes of storytelling and movement within these quilting practices.
Academic Qualifications
D. Sociology, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK
MA Sociology: Culture, Globalisation and the City, Goldsmiths College, University of London, London, UK
BA Biology, Sociology, and Spanish, Macalester College, St. Paul, Minnesota, USA
Gabriel's ethnographic research grapples with gender, place, and race in the digital age.
Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan’s audio-visual and written work engages with the ways in which digital media consumption, production, and circulation shape understandings of migration, gender, race, and urban space.
Filmmaker, writer, and curator Mao investigates art, activism and the political economy through the lens of social anthropology.
I am interested in the relationships between art and political economy. I structure my fieldworks as performative research interventions, combining anthropology, visual art and critical pedagogy reflecting on the power relations entangled in the ethnographic encounter. I look on the role of art institutions and cultural organizations in relation to the bio-politics and political economy of late capitalism.
In my approach to research, theory and practice intertwines. My practice being situated at the intersection of pedagogy, art and activism which I explore from within projects I co-initiated like the Institute of Radical Imagination and the Laboratory of Urban Commons, which aim at co-producing research, knowledge, artistic and political research-interventions to implement post-capitalist forms of life based on the idea that art is political prefiguration and political prefiguration is art.
I am a social anthropologist interested in violence, non-state justice, controversies and staff/student collaboration.
My doctoral research was on Guatemalan vigilantism, and while I still consider the anthropology of violence my primary field of research, since completing my PhD at Sussex in 2008, I have written and researched topics as spanning from the Antiques Roadshow to gambling advertising.
My most recent book (with Natalie Djohari) explores the history of anthropology through controversies, aiming to introduce those new to anthropology to its history without glossing over the more problematic areas. In 2021 I will be conducting research for the British Academy/Leverhulme-funded project 'Watching the Coast'.
I am a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and Editor of the Royal Anthropological Institute's Teaching Anthropology journal. I am also an Admissions Tutor, Convenor of the BA Anthropology, and I run the Anthropology Department’s summer school.
Helen is interested in the anthropology of history and the past, British Witchcraft and Paganism, and regional British ethnography, in particular Cornwall.
My anthropological research explores the practices and politics of historical knowledge and how it is drawn through both official and informal sources.
I am interested in how the past constituted through dynamic and everyday historicity and senses of temporality, that includes ritual, experience, material culture, landscape, and folklore as well as archived sources and expert interpretations.
My longitudinal fieldwork is rooted in my doctoral research with British Witches and Wiccans, partly located at the Museum of Witchcraft in Cornwall.
I am preparing a monograph for publication in 2019 in the Routledge Anthropology of History series.
Minou is a filmmaker, film curator and writer based in London (UK) and Athens (GR).
Minou Norouzi is an Austrian-Iranian filmmaker, writer, and curator based in London (UK) and Athens (GR). She obtained her PhD from Goldsmiths, University of London supported by the Arts and Humanity Research Council (2018). Her research examines the objectification of the real in the context of interdisciplinary documentary practices. She draws from documentary studies, feminist film scholarship, and postcolonial ethnographic studies to reframe documentary ethics from a feminist materialist standpoint.
Whilst giving the impression of layered fiction her video works are routed in documentary practice. Thematic interests have included identity politics and the psychological landscapes of incubated desire, migration politics expressed through plant life or explored through social practice in collaboration with refugee youths. Her full-length biopic on the controversial 60s cultural icon Carlos Castaneda explores myth-making and the ‘fictioning’ of the anthropological real.
Her films have been shown at South London Gallery, Calvert 22 (London), Centre for Contemporary Arts (Glasgow), Telic Arts Exchange (Los Angeles), and at film festivals including the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Kasseler Dok Fest, Videoex, Hot Docs.
Minou initiated the Arts Council England funded Sheffield Fringe project in 2011 and has been involved in organizing film-related events at Whitechapel Gallery and Close-Up Film Centre (London); S1 Artspace and Bloc Projects (Sheffield); UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art and apexart (New York); MARSistanbul and SALT Beyoğlu (Istanbul).
She is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Arts at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, Finland.
I am a Senior Research Fellow in Anthropology and the co-director of the Global Challenges Research Fund Global Gender and Cultures of Equality (GlobalGRACE) Project: https://www.globalgrace.net/.
Aside from directing GlobalGRACE, I work principally with our project partners in Bangladesh on 'Women working in men's worlds: visualising female construction workers and the quest for more equitable futures in Sylhet'; and with our project partners in Mexico on 'Por el buen vivir y el buen migrar: creating cultures of equality through the Migrant Museum with indigenous communities of Chiapas'.
As with all our GlobalGRACE research, both these projects bring theoretical approaches from gender studies and anthropology together with arts based practices and multi-sensory research to investigate the production of cultures of equality internationally.
Dr Nici Nelson has published on urban anthropology; gender and development; approaches to development such as participatory methodologies and policy issues; gender and sexuality; urban livelihoods in the informal sector; child fostering; HIV/AIDS; and marriage and households with specific reference to East Africa.
In addition to her academic work, she has done regular consultancies for aid and development organisations such as ACORD, the Eritrean Consortium, UNICEF and UNFPA, in Eastern and Southern Africa.
Areas of supervision
Current PhD students
Sarah O'Neill, Defying the law, negotiating change. The Futanke's opposition to the national ban on FGM in Senegal
Completed PhD students
Nandera Mhando, Meaning, Gender and Kinship Making Aming the Kuria of Tanzania: Male and Female Agency
