victoria ọgọegbunam okoye

I’m a creative researcher, educator, and writer. I interrogate urban spatial narratives and everyday space-making practices in urban West African contexts, and I think relationally between African indigenous practices and experiences and the global production of Blackness.

I am a Lecturer in Black Geographies at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland (UK). I completed my PhD in Urban Studies and Planning at the University of Sheffield. I previously taught undergraduate geography (Sheffield Hallam University) and completed a postdoctoral fellowship (SOAS, University of London).

My PhD research (titled: “Children’s community space experiences in Nima: Tracing racializing assemblages of the human“) was a collaborative activist project with Spread-Out Initiative NGO, situated in their neighborhood of Nima in Accra, Ghana. We built a collaborative approach grounded in architectural and arts-based methods, examined young people’s embodied spatial experiences  in community spaces, and our work pointed to embodied experiences of space, and the ways that children employ creative and mundane modes of making space for play and leisure, supporting alternative meanings for their neighborhood and the city. 

My research approach is shaped by my identity as an Igbo diasporan born in the United States;  my living, working, relating, and learnings in West African cities,  particularly Accra, Lagos, and Owerri; my training in urban studies and creative collaborations with youth and artists; and my connections and learning from/with a broad range of Black and African scholars in the humanities and social sciences. I focus on space and embodied spatial experience of place, and I often begin from scholarship, writings, and narratives of global Blackness and Black geographies of Africa and the African Diaspora, African cosmologies and ontologies, and Black (African and African Diaspora) methodologies.