Live Event: Could you be arrested for planting flowers in your street?

What guerrilla gardening reveals about our relationship with urban
nature and culture. Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one
of the founding stones for the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre
for the Humanities. Dr Elizabeth Ewart, Head of the School of
Anthropology and Museum Ethnography at the University of Oxford
joins JC Niala, one of her doctoral students to discuss human
relationships to nature in cities. Dr Ewart has an interest in the
anthropology of everyday practices such as gardening. JC Niala's
doctoral research focuses on urban gardeners in Oxford and she is
interested in the what their everyday practice reveals about the
way we live.Working with the case study of guerrilla gardeners who
operate in cities such as London and Oxford they will explore the
interactions between different types of gardeners that challenge
commonly held assumptions about nature and culture. Biographies: JC
Niala JC is a doctoral researcher with an interest in how people’s
imaginations of nature, affects the environment. With a focus on
urban practice, she has worked on food sovereignty projects in
Kenya . JC has used verbatim theatre as a tool for community
engagement with both adaptation and mitigation strategies for
dealing with climate change. JC's current ecological project 'Plant
an orchestra' brings together her love of music and trees.
Elizabeth Ewart Elizabeth Ewart is Associate Professor in the
anthropology of Lowland South America. Her research is with
indigenous people in Central Brazil where she has lived and worked
with Panará people. She is interested in the material and visual
aspects of Amerindian lived worlds, including body adornment,
beadwork, garden design and village layout and is also interested
in the anthropology of everyday practices, such as child rearing
and gardening. More recently, she has been developing research in
southwestern Ethiopia (together with Dr Wolde Tadesse), on local
agriculture and food production, specifically in relation to a
local staple, enset (Ensete ventricosum or Abyssinian banana),
exploring the manifold connections between cultivation, cooking,
animal husbandry, land custodianship and sense of wellbeing among
Gamo communities in the southern Ethiopian highlands.