Wangui Kimari & Victoria Ogoegbunam Okoye: "Native, Worker, Owner: Theorizing African Embodiments in the City"

Workshop series "Teaching African Cities"

Sponsored by the African Urban Dynamics CRG under the auspices of AEGIS, the workshop series "Teaching African Cities" features scholars and teachers who focus on African cities. Organized around a series of themes, these workshops are intended to build on and complement each other, creating a space to share resources and ideas among both seasoned instructors and individuals who are new to the classroom. The workshops are unified through a shared commitment to centering African experiences and expertise and promoting an ethical approach to community engagement in teaching courses about African cities.

Wangui Kimari & Victoria Ogoegbunam Okoye will talk about how urban spaces are shaped by a multitude of histories, peoples, spirits, ecologies, economies and aspirations – even when particular narratives remain hegemonic in the formal archives. While acknowledging the longue duree of colonialism, in this session, they will intentionally embrace other entangled embodiments that speak from African places. They recognize vernacular articulations of the city across different times. Drawing on music videos, superhero animations, adolescent drawings, grassroots environmental efforts, slang vernaculars, student protests, cultural proverbs and more, they seek to share tools and techniques to enable more situated encounters with diverse African cities. Their primary objective is to encourage co-learning about African urban spaces through articulations that are often not legitimated as critical tools, yet which register important and insurgent claims about the histories, presents and futures of dynamic African cities.

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