Chinelo Njaka
Somerville-Ethox Visiting Scholar
March-April 2022
Chinelo L. Njaka, Ph.D. (she/her/hers) is a social researcher, public sociologist, and maker-artist. She is usually based in South East London, where she is the Founder and Director of Peckham Rights!, a not-for-profit organisation that combats systemic racism(s) and champions everyday human rights for the people of Peckham, London and beyond.
Dr. Njaka earned her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Manchester. Her main areas of expertise and interest are race, racialisation, and racism(s) at the state, institutional, and voluntary and community sector levels, African Diaspora/people of African descent, Critical Mixed Race Studies, qualitative methods, health and health promotion, human rights, and craft/creative practices. Her recent publications include her book, Mixed Race in the US and UK: Comparing the Past, Present, and Future (2020) and article, “A Dialectic of Race Discourses: The Presence/Absence of Mixed Race at the State, Institution, and Civil Society and Voluntary and Community Sector Levels in the United Kingdom” (2022).
During her Somerville-Ethox Visiting Scholarship, Dr. Njaka will be exploring COVID-19 as a crucial locus for bioethical focus in the UK. Through the lens of race-criticality, she will be investigating the direct impact of UK government COVID-19 policies and wider handling of the pandemic on disparities in rates of adult vaccination, transmission, serious illness, and death among the UK’s Black African and Caribbean populations, including Mixed/Multiple Black ethnic groups