PUBLICATIONS
My publications have broadly focused on the decolonization of knowledge about urban Africa(ns) and the critique of neoliberal entrepreneurial respectability politics that projects a new afronormativity that ostracizes those who continue to exist on the margins of society.
Smyth, A., Adeniyi-Ogunyankin, G., Datta, A., Basu, S., de Souza, K., Tsz Ting Ip, P., … Peake, L. (2026). Women’s Embodied Experiences of Debt in the Urban Global South. Feminist Economics, 32(2), 329–352.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/13545701.2026.2645760
ABSTRACT
Feminist political economy has been enhanced by understanding the urban as a dynamic site of social reproduction. This article reveals how one aspect of social reproduction – women’s accounting for and managing the sociality around debt, that is, caring for debt – is expressed through embodied gendered norms that play out in the everyday lives of women in low-income urban neighborhoods in the Global South. Drawing on geo-ethnographic research, the article analyzes embodied experiences of indebtedness among grassroots women navigating economic precarity in Cochabamba (Bolivia), Delhi (India), Georgetown (Guyana), Ibadan (Nigeria), and Shanghai (China). The article illustrates how caring for debt is experienced through emotional, mental, and physical dimensions of women’s embodiment, expressed through their entanglement with socio-spatialities of the neoliberal urban. The analysis further underscores that women’s work caring for debts is an additional out-of-sight dimension of the unpaid and underpaid social reproductive labor driving urban economies in the Global South.
Daley, P., Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S.J., Kimari, W., Obeng-Odoom, F., Tamale, S., Bauriedl, S., Bawa, S., Carstensen-Egwuom, I., Adeniyi-Ogunyankin, G., Al-Bulushi, Y. and Ouma, S. (2026), African Decolonial Theory: A Conversation. Antipode, 58: e70110.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.70110
ABSTRACT
Antipode has become a key platform for engaging with decolonial and anticolonial scholarship, as well as adjacent fields such as Black geographies, Indigenous studies, Latin American feminism, and work on settler-colonialism. African reference points in this literature, however, have been far less common, both in the journal and more broadly in radical geography. Recognizing that there are several loci of enunciation for decolonial and anticolonial work, we committed to curating a series of conversations with and interventions by leading scholars from Africa and its diaspora associated with these epistemic and political projects. This long-read article, a first for the journal, brings these conversations and interventions together, highlighting the power of each as well as the common threads that connect them.
Adeniyi-Ogunyankin, G. (2025). The city of homosocial breadwinners. Dialogues in Human Geography, 16(1), 282–285.
Adeniyi-Ogunyankin, G., Babalola, A., & Witaszek, K. (2025). Black futurity. In S. Calkin & C. Freeman (Eds.), De Gruyter handbook of feminist political geography (pp. 129–140). De Gruyter.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111289274-011
ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that Black futurity has prompted feminist political geography to pay more attention to the ways in which time contributes to (re)producing power relations. By situating Black futurity as a critical aspect of Black geographies, we explore how Black social-spatial temporalities emphasize Black agency and resistance through everyday politics and dynamic practices, improvisations, and Black livingness which trouble Black victimhood and highlight both Black present and future as sites and temporalities with new possibilities. We assert that Black futurity not only resides in Afrofuturistic reimagining through speculative texts but is also rooted in the ‘future present,’ current spaces, and daily shapeshifting of moving from objecthood to subjecthood. We also underscore the symbiotic relationship between Black futurity and feminist political geography by emphasizing the former’s engagement with alternative geopolitical visions and geopolitical praxes as they pertain to valuing Black life, livingness, and worldmaking.
Peake, L, Datta, A & Adeniyi-Ogunyankin, G. (Eds.). (2024). Handbook on gender and cities. Edward Elgar Publishing.
Peake, L., Razavi, N. S., & Smyth, A. (Eds.) (2024). Doing feminist urban research: Insights from the GenUrb project. London: Routledge. ISBN 9781032668673, 2024.
Collaborative book project for the SSHRC Partnership Grant Project. Contributed to several sections within the book.
Peake, L., Katsikana, M., Adeniyi-Ogunyankin, G., Datta, A., Basu, S., de Souza, K., Ip, P. T. T., Marcus, J., Ponce, C., Razavi, N. S., Smyth, A., & Yousuf, B. (2024). Urban geography in crisis times: Insights from a feminist project. Geographica Helvetica, 79(3), 283–288.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5194/gh-79-283-2024
ABSTRACT
In this short intervention addressing the impact of crises on geographical knowledge practices, we, members of GenUrb (a multi-sited, longitudinal, partnered urban research project), ask, “what counts as crisis?”, sketching out epistemological and methodological points about our project’s engagement with this call. We query the adeptness of dominant Eurocentric epistemologies in addressing crises, adopting the work of Bedour Alagraa, who places crises firmly within a historical–geographical colonial framing that conceptualizes crises not through rupture but through continuation. We illustrate the utility of this epistemological framing of crisis, honing in on the everyday violence that women continually experience, with our research in the cities of Cochabamba, Delhi, Georgetown, Ibadan, Ramallah, and Shanghai, showing that one in every two women participants had experienced intimate partner violence. We further ask what crises mean for the methodologies we adopt, specifically concerning questions of the co-production of knowledge and methods.
Adeniyi-Ogunyankin, G. (2024). Empowered, almost: Luxury consumption and the crooked urban life. Urban Geography, 45(9), 1536–1555.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2024.2336849
ABSTRACT
“What’s hair got do with it?” is the question at the heart of this paper that is based on fieldwork in Lagos and Ibadan, Nigeria (June 2022–September 2022; April–June 2023). These two cities are undergoing urban change, particularly in terms of renewal, beautification, and more regional and foreign investments. I engage with ethnographic fiction and ethnographic reflection to explore youth’s desire to consume luxury as a pathway to empowerment via upward social mobility so that they can partake in the “good” parts of urban change while trying to circumvent increasing uncertainty and high levels of unemployment in the city. Through this engagement, I consider how beauty is deeply spatial by highlighting the relationship between hair, aspirational identity, imagined future selves and youth (im)mobility in two short stories, Miracle and Lagos Big Babe. Informed by Faria and Fluri’s (2022, Allure and the spatialities of nationalism, war and development: Towards a geography of beauty. Geography Compass, 16(9), e12652. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12652) work on the geography of beauty, I emphasize that beauty has a material and affective quality that is corporeal and grounded in place. I tie the two stories together in my reflection on the role hair can play in building social capital and increasing social mobility while arguing that these aspirational identities are being fashioned in structurally skewed discursive neoliberal urban spaces.
Adeniyi-Ogunyankin, G. (2024). Moments. GeoHumanities, 10(1), 192–196.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/2373566X.2023.2275668
ABSTRACT
Moments narrates the changes that have taken place over a span of four years, nine months, and four days in the life of a woman known as Mummy Ayesha who lives in Challenge, a neighborhood in Ibadan SouthWest Local Government Area. The experiences of Mummy Ayesha are drawn from Genurb (Urbanization, Gender & the Global South) Ibadan City Research Team data. Moments showcases the danger of a single story about poverty, illustrates the temporal and spatial dimensions of socio-economic inequalities, and offers insight on the city’s role in providing opportunities as well as bearing witness to one’s despair. Most especially, Mummy Ayesha’s story illuminates the intricate relationship between future orientations, relationality, care and well-being.
Kara, H, & Chaudhry, S & Adeniyi-Ogunyankin, G. (2024). Youth in the city: Between precarity and futurity. In Peake, L, & Datta, A & Adeniyi-Ogunyankin, G. (Eds.), Handbook on gender and cities (pp. 334-342). Edward Elgar Publishing.
Peake, L, Adeniyi-Ogunyankin, G., & Datta, A. (2024). Introduction: Gender and cities. In Peake, L, A. Datta & Adeniyi-Ogunyankin, G. (Eds.), Handbook on gender and cities (pp. 1–22). Edward Elgar Publishing.
Adeniyi-Ogunyankin, G. A. (2023). New orientations. Incoherence. Dialogues in Human Geography, 0(0).
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12732
ABSTRACT
In this commentary, I engage with Simone et al.’s article, ‘Inhabiting the Extensions’, by reflecting on its connections to my work on uncertainty and urban change in Ibadan and Lagos, Nigeria, and to my recent turn to queer theory to better understand the urban. In doing so, I highlight how youth think a new orientation towards a luxurious lifestyle is their answer to instability and consider the importance of embracing incoherence as a way of having a more nuanced understanding of everyday life and challenging teleological timeframes.
Koleth, E., Peake, L., Razavi, N. & Adeniyi-Ogunyankin, G. (2023) Decolonizing feminist explorations of urban futures. Urban Geography, 44(9), 1843-1852
DOI: 10.1080/02723638.2023.2257473
ABSTRACT
How do decolonial feminist urban imaginaries of urban futures begin to interrogate twenty-first century urban life? The urban futures signaled in this special issue highlight three dimensions of urban imaginaries. The first connects the privatization and commodification of urban infrastructures to state-based and capitalist discursive efforts to make the urban. The second concerns temporal convergences of past, present and future in visions of the urban that reproduce the recursive logics of coloniality by re-mapping the landscapes of urban inequality and dispossession through encounters with sedimentations of colonial and neocolonial formations. Third, authors take up the everyday as a site of struggle through which women’s negotiations and placemaking practices offer alternative urban imaginaries. These articles are based on papers given at the 2019 “Feminist Explorations of Urban Futures” conference organized by the transnational feminist research project, “Urbanization and Gender in the Global South: A Transformative Knowledge Network” (GenUrb).
Adeniyi-Ogunyankin, G. (2023). Estranged. City. Stranger(s). In Bishop, R. & Simone, A. (Eds.) Following the Fish (pp. 117-122). Special Issue. Biennale Architettura 2023.
Adeniyi-Ogunyankin (2022). After the revolution: Lagos 2025. Disembodied Territories Project.
Adeniyi-Ogunyankin, G. (2022). City of the future: Lagos and the afropolitan imagineering project of owambe urbanism. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research Spotlight On series.
Adeniyi-Ogunyankin, G. (2022). #ToxicWorkplaces: The future of youth employment in Nigeria. The Conversation.
Adeniyi-Ogunyankin, G. A. (2022). Grappling with the fragmentations: Black feminisms, African feminisms and the possibilities of Black geographies in Canada. Topia 44, 175-184.
Razavi, N.S., Adeniyi-Ogunyankin, G., Basu, S. Datta, A., de Souza, K., Ip, P.T.T., Marcus, J., Miraftab, F., Mullings, B., Nmormah, S., Odunola, B. Pardo Burgoa, S. & Peake, L. (2022). Everyday urbanism in the pandemic city: A feminist comparative study of the gendered experiences of Covid-19 in southern cities. Social & Cultural Geography
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2022.2104355
ABSTRACT
Drawing on GenUrb’s comparative research undertaken in mid-2020 with communities in five cities—Cochabamba, Bolivia, Delhi, India, Georgetown, Guyana, Ibadan, Nigeria, and Shanghai, China—we engage in an intersectional analysis of the gendered impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic in women’s everyday lives. Our research employs a variety of context-specific methods, including virtual methods, phone interviews, and socially-distanced interviews to engage women living in neighbourhoods characterized by underdevelopment and economic insecurity. While existing conditions of precarity trouble the before-and-after terminology of Covid-19, across the five cities the narratives of women’s everyday lives reveal shifts in spatial-temporal orders that have deepened gendered and racial exclusions. We find that limited mobilities and the different and changing dimensions of production and social reproduction have led to increased care work, violence, and strained mental health. Finally, we also find that social reproduction solidarities, constituting old and new circuits of care, have been reinforced during the pandemic.
Rankin, K., Adeniyi Ogunyankin, G. & Ninglehku, S. (2022). The right to the city: “The slum” and informal urbanisms. In A. Bain & L. Peake (Eds.), Urbanization in a global context (pp. 63-79). Oxford University Press.
Adeniyi-Ogunyankin, G., & Dosekun, S. (2021, July 29). Postfeminism is only for wealthy Nigerian women. Africa Is a Country.
Conte, M & Adeniyi-Ogunyankin, G. (2021). “Remember in March when they said 2 weeks…”. FIGS Zine.
Adeniyi-Ogunyankin, G., & Peake, L. (2021). Understanding the importance of a gendered analysis of covid- 19. In G. J. Andrews, V. A. Crooks, J. R. Pearce, & J. P. Messina (Eds.), COVID-19 and similar futures: Pandemic geographies (pp. 341–347). Springer International Publishing.
Adeniyi-Ogunyankin, G., & Peake, L. (2021). Tiwa’s morning. In M. Lancione & C. McFarlane (Eds.), Global urbanism: Knowledge, power and the city (pp. 116–123). Routledge.
Adeniyi-Ogunyankin, G., Bailey, M., Flynn, K., Judd, B., Weekley, A. K., Musial, J., & White, M. A. (2020). Black feminist thought and the gender, women’s, and feminist studies PhD: A roundtable discussion. Feminist Formations, 32(2), 1–28.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/ff.2020.0023
ABSTRACT
Based on a roundtable discussion convened at the 2017 National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) annual conference, “Forty Years After Combahee,” this discussion addresses the fraught relationship between Black feminist thought and doctoral training in gender, women’s, and feminist studies (GWFS). While intersectionality is nearly ubiquitously claimed as central to training in GWFS PhD programs, its institutionalization can serve to defang and dehistoricize the centrality of Black feminisms and womanisms, as well as marginalize, exclude, and/or fetishize Black feminists training and teaching in such programs. Participants critically examine the ongoing realities of a white-centric canon, the disingenuous and racialized division of academia and community activism, struggles for Black-affirming spaces, anti-Black peer microaggressions, white fragility, and lack of mentorship, isolation, and “pushout.” The authors reflect on their experiences transitioning from historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and non-HBCU undergraduate programs to GWFS PhD programs and post-PhD faculty life; the importance of mentorship and community-building; Black intellectual and embodied navigations of institutional structures under white supremacy; racialized affective labor; and the place of GWFS PhD training in the futures of Black feminist thought and field (re)formation. The resulting written collaboration serves as part wake-up call, part warning, and part “truth telling” about the realities of being a Black woman intellectual navigating GWFS PhD training and post-PhD faculty life.
Adeniyi Ogunyankin, G. A. (2019). ‘The city of our dream’: Owambe urbanism and low‐income women’s resistance in Ibadan, Nigeria. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 43(3), 423–441.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12732
ABSTRACT
Ibadan, Nigeria, has been an outlier in the ranking of world-class cities. But in the past seven years, amidst the circulating Africa Rising narrative, Ibadan has embarked on what I call an Afropolitan Imagineering project of owambe urbanism. Afropolitan Imagineering refers to the production of new images/narratives of Africa and Africans as world-class and cosmopolitan. Owambe urbanism is a spatio-temporal neoliberal project concerning destination, arrival and place-making, which promises a shared and happy future for all urban dwellers. I argue that this promise of happiness is challenged by low-income women who are cognizant that a shared and happy future is impossible when little effort is made to address social inequality in the present. They thus refuse to be ‘good’ citizens and invoke an alternative urban futurity through their embodied and imagined resistance.
Adeniyi-Ogunyankin, G. (2019). ‘Spare tires’, ‘second fiddle’ and ‘prostitutes’? Interrogating discourses about women and politics in Nigeria (Reprint). In B. Rutherford & P. Adesanmi (Eds.), Africa matters: Cultural politics, political economies and grammars of protest (pp. 45-74). Daraja Press.
Adeniyi Ogunyankin, G. (2019). In/out of Nigeria: Transnational research and the politics of identity and
knowledge production. Gender, Place & Culture, 26 (10), 1386–1401
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2018.1481370
ABSTRACT
This article explores the murkiness of fieldwork and writing that often comes with simultaneous positioning as insider/outsider. I engage with two key themes: First, identity, legitimacy and representation and, second, the gray spaces between theory and reality. The first theme examines the contradictions of being perceived as both an insider and outsider; the complexities of identity and language while at ‘home’ in the field, and the challenges of performing the native informant role while back ‘home’ in Canada. The second theme explores the uncomfortable dilemma of engaging with the ‘Rush to Theory’ from the global south. I will examine how the theories are sophisticated and provocative, yet prove unsatisfactory in terms of having practical applications. I conclude the article by positing that, despite the challenges of doing transnational work, transnational subjects invariably contribute to the creation of a new politics of knowledge production and to the attainment of social justice.
Adeniyi Ogunyankin, G. (2019). Mothering, urbanization and Africa. In L. O’Brien Hallestein, A. O’Reilly, & M. Vandenbeld Giles (Eds.), The Routledge companion to motherhood (pp. 414-425). Oxfordshire, UK: Routledge.
ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how the relationship between mothering and urbanization in Africa has been understood by Africanist scholars. The predominant theme points to mother’s economic challenges in increasingly neoliberalizing cities. The contemporary struggles of mothers have been linked to colonial legacies such as their exclusions under the colonial urban economy and the colonial legal framework that treated women as property – thus limiting their economic opportunities. These colonial legacies have been further exacerbated under neoliberal economic reforms that have increased their financial responsibilities in the maintenance of their families. Despite their marginalization, mothers are engaged in activism to assert their rights to the city and demand a more livable life. The central issues that have been highlighted by scholars pertain to skills acquisition training and urban displacement, as they respectively relate to the quest to empower mothers and make them more economically autonomous, and to government efforts to hide poverty and make urban space more viable for regional and global capital. This chapter also highlights that emerging scholarship on mothering and urbanization in Africa point to the premature conclusions on falling poverty among female-headed households and the need to diversify research on urban motherhood beyond the poverty lens.
Adeniyi Ogunyankin, G. (2019). Postcolonial approaches to the study of African politics. Oxford research encyclopedia of politics. New York: Oxford University Press.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.830
ABSTRACT
Postcolonial theory has been embraced and critiqued by various scholars since the 1980s. Central to the field of postcolonial studies is the examination of colonial episteme and discourse, European racism, and imperial dominance. Broadly, postcolonialism analyzes the effects, and enduring legacies, of colonialism and disavows Eurocentric master-narratives. Postcolonial ideas have been significant to several academic disciplines, largely those in the humanities and social sciences, such as cultural and literary studies, anthropology, political science, history, development studies, geography, urban studies, and gender and sexuality studies. The key scholars that are connected to postcolonial theory, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Spivak, have been critiqued for grounding their work in the Western theories of postmodernism and poststructuralism. Given the predominant association of these three scholars to postcolonial theory, Africanists have argued that postcolonial theory is dismissive of African theorizing. Moreover, some scholars have noted that Africanists have hesitated to use postcolonial theory because it is too discursive and has limited applicability to material reality. As such, the relevancy of postcolonial theory to Africa has been a repetitive question for decades. Despite this line of questioning, some scholars have posited that there are African thinkers and activists who are intellectual antecedents to the postcolonial thought that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s. Additionally, other Africanist scholars have engaged with the colonial discursive construction of African subjectivities and societies as inferior. These engagements have been particularly salient in women and gender studies, urban studies and studies of identity and global belonging.
Adeniyi Ogunyankin, G. (2018). A “scented declaration of progress”: Globalization, Afropolitan imagineering, and familiar orientations. Antipode, 50(5), 1145–1165.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12392
ABSTRACT
Branded as “Africa’s first luxury perfume”, the Scent of Africa perfume is a “scented declaration of progress”. Particularly fascinating is the commercial advertisement for the perfume, which I argue to be an “Afropolitan Imagineering” project that is intended to signal Africa’s rise and its new association with global cosmopolitanism. At first glance, the Scent of Africa perfume advertisement seems to point to the ways in which Imagineering projects can reproduce colonial discourses about Africanness. However, in this article, I suggest that we complicate the advertisement and examine its subversive potential to decentre whiteness and celebrate Africanness while writing Africa into the world. Despite this subversion, I conclude that African worlding practices should disinherit the familiarity of Eurocentric geographic determinism that is embedded in Afropolitan Imagineering and instead become informed by afro-futuristic imaginings and disidentification politics.
Adeniyi Ogunyankin, G. (2018). Dislocation, mimicry and the geography of belonging in Sefi Atta’s A bit of Difference. In D. Fongang (Ed.), The postcolonial subject in transit: Migration, borders and subjectivity in African diaspora literature (pp. 139-153). Lexington Books.
ABSTRACT
Sefi Atta’s A bit of difference (2013) explores issues of belonging, identity, racism, culture, gender, and sexuality that affect the main character Deola, and her friends Subu and Bandele. Deola, Subu and Bandele’s various experiences of inclusion and exclusion in Lagos and London lead them to have different understandings of home. For Deola, ‘home’ is the place of origin and her discontentment with the ways in which she can be both hypervisible and invisible in the predominantly white spaces of London convinces her to return ‘home’ to Nigeria. I use the concepts of homely and unhomely to explore the ways in which Deola loses and finds herself in both the familiar and unfamiliar spaces of London and Lagos. I also examine the notion of home as destination through Bandele’s desires to disavow the heteronormative understanding of Nigeria as a homeland and search for a ‘home’ where he will not be “othered”. Through Subu, I argue that London is a home away from ‘home’ because her nostalgia for ‘home’ enables her to engage in home-making practices in London that re-perform ‘home’.
Bawa, S., & Adeniyi Ogunyankin, G. (2018). (Un)African women: Identity, class and moral geographies in postcolonial times. African Identities, 16(4), 444–459.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14725843.2018.1474340
ABSTRACT
The concrete and abstract geographies of difference on the African continent not only arise from environmental, socio-cultural and religious factors but also from the historical and differential impacts and experiences of colonization and its legacies. In this paper, we use the web series, An African City, as a reference point, to examine the troubling nature of binary depictions of a colonial/traditional Africa and a new/modern/global Africa. Relying on Postcolonial feminist methodologies of critique and deconstruction, we propose that in countering such simplistic narratives, Africa ought to be seen as constructed, abstract, material, plural and confusing in order to account for its complexities. In particular, we focus on the centrality of women to African identity discourses. We argue that while Afropolitan and Africa rising discourses simultaneously challenge and interrupt problematic colonial constructions of Africa as backward and in need of salvation, they also (perhaps more problematically) still re-centre the West as the progenitor of progress, thereby reiterating the colonial tale.
Adeniyi Ogunyankin, G. & Buckley, M. (2017). Instant and incremental urban development. In A. Bain & L.
Peake (Eds.), Urbanization in a global context (pp. 70-86). Oxford University Press.
Adeniyi Ogunyankin, G. (2016). Parenting cross-culturally: Migritude and the contradictions of Black
masculinity. In B. Brillian Muhonja & W. Thomas Bernard (Eds.) Mothers and sons (pp. 255-269). Toronto: Demeter Press.
Adeniyi Ogunyankin, G. (2016). Hossein, C.S.. Politicized microfinance: Money, power and violence in the black
Americas. Voluntas: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations.
Adeniyi Ogunyankin, G. (2016, Feb. 1). From stones to guns: On embracing anger, love and humour. Carleton University Faculty of Arts and Science Blog.
Adeniyi Ogunyankin, G. (2016).“These girls’ fashion is sick”: An African city and the geography of sartorial worldliness. Feminist Africa 21, 37-51.
ABSTRACT
This paper argues that the embodiment of fashion in the web series, An African City, is a geographical site for challenging dominant Eurocentric narratives about African women as insignificant to the global spaces of fashion. By situating embodied fashion as a site of analysis, the paper posits that the sartorial elegance in An African city is part of the “Africa Rising” rhetoric and serves to announce Africa’s cosmopolitan worldliness while simultaneously linking this progress to the bodies of upper-middle class “Afropolitan” women. Thus, the paper claims that while the use of fashion as a counter narrative offers a critical intervention in the web series, it concomitantly contributes to the production of negative discourses about poor and non-“Afropolitan” women as unfashionable.