Niamh is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Geography, where she works on the Plumbing Poverty project led by Professor Katie Meehan and leads the project’s Los Angeles case study. The project draws on social reproduction, urban political ecology, and racial capitalism, coupled with ethnographic and census-based research, to investigate why household water insecurity arises and persists in wealthy cities and countries across the Global North.

Niamh holds a PhD in Social Welfare from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her doctoral research examined how homeless interventions in Los Angeles reproduce homelessness and entrench racial disproportionality in homelessness. Drawing on three years of ethnographic fieldwork and participant observation in South Los Angeles, the project centred the critical perspectives of community-based, Black-led homeless service providers.

Research

• Critical poverty studies
• Displacement and dispossession
• Postcolonial studies
• Infrastructure and cities
• Housing insecurity and houselessness
• Poverty governance and welfare systems