We are delighted to welcome Dr Victoria Okoye to our JMS Network Event, from 6-8pm on Wednesday 29 May 2025 in the Kelvin Hall Lecture Theatre.

Victoria Ogoegbunam Okoye is a researcher, community collaborator, creative, and 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 we, as Black peoples, produce Black life, reconfigure space, and produce ways of knowing our geographic worlds. Her work attends to Blackness and Black geographies in the afterlife of the interconnected global projects of enslavement and colonialism and takes seriously the ongoing realities of coloniality in the everyday production of space. Her career has spanned work and learnings from West African urban residents, artists, and creatives' practices of shaping urban life - from street vending and other forms of spatial appropriations, to street festivals, and masquerade, and includes more recent collaborative archival work in the UK, digging into histories of Black and Brown presence in South Yorkshire.

Her work draws on and has produced oral histories, speculative writing and poetry, visual documentation (photography, body mapping, other mapping practices), and site-specific, practice-based creative interventions. Her approaches are informed by her training in and teaching urban studies and design, geography, and architecture.

At present, her current work is developing along two trajectories: the first, drawing on the horticultural practice of grafting as conceptual and methodological approach, interrogates her office building (the Institute of Geography's) entangled ecological connections to Caribbean plantation enslavement. Through creative practices, the research honors enslaved ancestors through a project of repair that includes archival autoethnography, embodied artmaking with plantlife, and site-specific installation. 

Her second interdisciplinary project weaves together creative and qualitative methods to explore Igbo masquerade in southeastern Nigeria as a Black, poetic, world-making spatial practice, drawing on poetry, drama, and sensory ethnography.