DPhil Student, Social Anthropology
St Catherine's College
Thesis: Banal Utopia: Urban gardening as a practice for materialising utopic city spaces
Research key words: urban anthropology, space and place making, utopia, material culture, public engagement with research
Research: Niala is interested in how our imaginations of nature affect how we treat it. Her doctoral research combined traditional anthropology methodology with public engagement with research to examine the relationship between urban gardeners in Oxford and the spaces which they materialise.
Niala also has an interest in museum collections and uses Community Action Research to support research carried out in galleries, libraries, archives and museums. This work includes research into museology and archaeology practice and its effects on the communities linked to the collections.
In the growing season of 2021, Niala recreated an allotment in the style of the year 1918. This project was in collaboration with Fig an Oxford based community, arts and horticulture project and was supported by The Humanities Cultural Programme at TORCH. The project was awarded the Social History Society's Public History Prize in 2022.
Previous education
MSc Social Anthropology, University of Oxford (2018) with distinction
MSt Creative Writing, University of Oxford (2017)
Awards
AHRC-TORCH Public Engagement with Research Summer School Pitching Competition (2018) First place
Community Engagement and Academic Merit Award (2017) Kellogg College, University of Oxford
IARU- Santander Global Summer Program Scholarship (2016)
Presentations
Niala JC (2021) English allotments as sites of utopia super diversity. Paper presented at Utopian Studies Society Conference, online
Niala (2021) A heritage caravan: combining social and mobile technologies to reconnect communities
to their material culture. Paper presented at Society for Africanist Archaeologists Research sessions
Niala, J.C. (2018) Reconstructing Relationships: An autoethnographic account of post-colonial museum encounters. Work in progress paper presented at Museum Ethnographers Group conference. Oxford, United Kingdom
Publications
2022 Rethinking Relationships and building trust around African collections Journal of Museum Ethnography 35: 49-62
2022 Portal: 1918 Allotment Fig
2022 The Root of the Matter Podcast Series Wellcome Collections
2021 The Missing Link: Community Contribution and Absence in Archaeology in East Africa with Sherry DavisBulletin of the History of Archaeology31(1): 3-4
https://www.archaeologybulletin.org/articles/10.5334/bha-660
2021 Dig for Vitality: UK urban allotments as a health promoting response to COVID-19Cities and Health5(1): 227-231
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23748834.2020.1794369
Niala, J.C. (2019, March) Reconstructing Relationships: An autoethnographic account of post-colonial museum encounters. Journal of Museum Ethnography.
Website: www.jcniala.com
Email: jc.niala@anthro.ox.ac.uk
Twitter: @jcniala
