Victoria Ogoegbunam Okoye

My research centers the global production of Blackness in African and African diaspora geographies and the inventive cultural and spatial practices through which we, as Black peoples, produce Black life, reconfigure space, and produce ways of knowing our geographic worlds. 

I attend to Blackness and Black geographies in the afterlife of the interconnected global projects of enslavement and colonialism, and I take seriously the ongoing realities of coloniality in the everyday production of space. I also learn from urban residents, artists, and creatives' practices of shaping urban life - from street vending and other forms of spatial appropriations, to street festivals, and masquerade. So far, my work has drawn on and produced oral histories, speculative writing and poetry, visual documentation (photography, body mapping, other mapping practices), and practice-based interventions (site-specific art installations).

My academic training, teaching and research spans urban studies, architecture, and geography; I am also formatively shaped by my collaborations with residents, artists and creatives in Nigeria, Ghana, and the UK. 

Current research projects: 

Grafting Black Ecological Life in Edinburgh: Drawing on the horticultural practice of grafting, this research advances a conceptual approach and creative methodology that advances Black ecological life. The project interrogates the Institute of Geography's entangled ecological connections to Caribbean plantation enslavement and honors enslaved ancestors through a project of repair, which includes practices of archival autoethnography, embodied artmaking with plantlife, and site-specific installation within the building.

Worldmaking through the Black spatial poetics of Igbo masquerade: This interdisciplinary project weaves together creative and qualitative methods to explore Igbo masquerade in southeastern Nigeria as a Black, poetic, world-making spatial practice. Bringing together poetry, drama, interviews, and sensory ethnography, this project analyses the masquerade's poetic and performative meanings as spatial expressions.

I teach on a range of undergraduate courses: 

• Human Geography (1st year course)
• Fieldwork in Human Geography (Belfast, Northern Ireland) (3rd year course)
• Black Geographies (3rd and 4th year honors option course)
• Dissertation in Human Geography (4th year course)

www.victoriaokoye.com

[email protected]