victoria ogoegbunam okoye

Victoria Ogoegbunam Okoye is a creative researcher, educator, and community collaborator. She is a Lecturer in Black Geographies at University of Edinburgh. Her work centers the global production of Blackness in African and African diaspora geographies and the inventive cultural and spatial practices through which Black peoples produce Black life, reconfigure space, and produce ways of knowing our spatial worlds. Her work attends to Blackness and Black geographies in the afterlife of the interconnected global projects of enslavement and colonialism, focusing on the everyday production of space.

Her career has spanned collaborations and learnings with urban residents, artists, and creatives’ practices of shaping urban life: from street vending, street festivals, and youth photography workshops and exhibitions (Accra, Ghana), to devising water, sanitation and design interventions in urban markets, in collaboration with vendors, activists, architects, and community leaders (Durban, South Africa; Kumasi, Ghana; Lagos, Nigeria). More recently, her work has spanned collaborative archival research digging into histories of Black and Brown presence (South Yorkshire, UK) as well as Edinburgh’s connections to Caribbean plantation enslavement through site-specific arts practice, linked to her research and teaching.

Her work draws on and has produced oral histories, embodied, speculative, and creative writing and poetry, visual documentation (photography, body mapping, other mapping practices), and site-specific, practice-based creative artworks and interventions. Her approaches are informed by her positionality as an Igbo diasporan and lived experiences and trajectories between West Africa, the US and the UK, as well as past and present collaborations with artists, creatives, youth and peers and her training in urban studies, design and planning.