I (she/her) am a creative researcher, educator, and community collaborator. My 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. How might we think our geographical and spatial worlds through Black ways of knowing, drawing on the wisdom of everyday cultural practices and spatial interventions?
My career has been varied and wide, spanning 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, my 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 my research and teaching as Lecturer in Black Geographies at The University of Edinburgh.
My 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. My approaches are informed by my positionality as a US-born 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 my training in urban studies, design and planning.
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