Projects
I engage in both ethnographic research and the analysis of popular culture to advance, localize and contextualize specific forms of cosmopolitanism and neoliberal urban projects in Africa.
To date, my work has largely sought to expand understanding of contemporary urban change that has been conditioned and limited by the analytical framing of the western term “neoliberal urbanism” by providing a more nuanced analysis that considers the relationship between culture, development, and the postcolonial politics of identity. I have recently begun to focus more on storytelling, based on my ethnographic research, to inform policy change.
Youth and African Urban Futures
This research programme seeks to provide a critical understanding of the relationship between youth, labour and neoliberal urban transformation. Specifically, I am interested in the role that the intersections of neoliberal urban change and labour play in (re)configuring youth identity and providing opportunities for youth to orientate themselves towards the future. The research moves beyond the focus on survival, immediacy of the present, and the precarious identity of African youths by exploring their trajectory, aspirational orientation and speculative futures.
Timeline: 2020-2025
Granting agency: Canada Research Chair (Tier 2)
GenUrb: Urbanization, Gender, and the Global South
Urbanization, Gender and the Global South (Co-investigator, SSHRC Partnership Grant, 2017-2023). This research is being conducted in six cities – Ibadan, Nigeria, Georgetown, Guyana, Cochabamba, Bolivia, Delhi, India, Shanghai, China, and Ramallah, Palestine. I am the team lead of the Ibadan project. The study explores how urban growth, in conjunction with neoliberalism, has raised issues around the making of social contracts between urban residents, cities and states, and of the urgent need for practical engagements with transnational feminist social justice work in the urban context.
Timeline: 2017-2023
Granting Agency: SSHRC Partnership Grant
Youth, Labour and Neoliberal Urban Transformation in Ibadan, Nigeria
Youth unemployment is apparently a “ticking timebomb” in Nigeria. As such, there’s been emphasis on urban renewal projects as a vehicle for attracting regional and global investors to urban centers in Nigeria – to propel economic growth and increase job opportunities. While a large number of youths remain unemployed, there is an increasing number of youths who are becoming employed. I thus examine the extent to which employment is considered and experienced as “decent” by youth in Ibadan. I ask: How is youth labour cultivated and performed? How do imaginaries of economic and social mobility affect how youths negotiate social relations of labour? In what ways is youth psychosocial wellbeing affected by their perceptions and experiences of constructs of their identities as workers and responsibilities and obligations to their social networks?
Timeline: 2020-2023
Granting Agency: SSHRC
Global capitalism and pan-African identity
Through a comparative analysis of consumer product advertisements and bank advertisements, I illustrate that African popular culture is highly engaged with the Africa Rising discourse on the continent. As such, I examine how the advertisements are place-making projects through their attempts to defamiliarize commonsense readings of Africa(ns) as ungeographic. By bringing in the lens of Black Geographies, I argue that the Africa rising trope inadvertently contributes to anti-black vernaculars of development and is entangled in the production of neoliberal respectability politics that are cruel attachments to global capitalism and a globalized identity.
Timeline: 2021-2023