My research is broadly centered around African digital media and cultural production. I work on the intersection of social media use among Africans and postcolonial identity. I am also interested in interrogating the implications of social media globalization, the individual exercise of power as a form of cultural capital and how this power is translated and reflected in the everydayness of African social media users. Some of the research questions I am interested in border on power politics, cultural identity, nationality, and how these phenomena shape the postcolonial identity.
Projects
Vibes and Insha Allah
In my study of memes, I am interested in the everyday Nigerian experience, i.e the everyday life that is interpellated on digital spaces. My research on memes is not aimed at essentializing the Nigerian experience, but demonstrating, as African digital media scholars claim, the cultural performances of Nigerian “netizens” that are reified by the affordances of digital media. [Watch Project Video]
The Cybernetic Death Machine (ongoing)
This research project investigates the intersection of digital technologies, state power, and queer identity in Nigeria. It focuses on the mediatization of state-sponsored violence through the affordances of social media. Drawing on Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics and Donna Haraway’s STS-feminist cyborg theory, this project examines how the mediatization of queer identities on Nigerian digital space transforms into what I term “Cybernetic Death Machine” (CDM).