Black History Month Feature: Victoria Ogoegbunam Okoye

 

As an Igbo diasporan with lived experience in the US, Ghana, the UK and Nigeria, I approach geography from an interdisciplinary, global perspective: First of all, my research and teaching is centred around Black Geographies: the ways Black peoples across African and diaspora contexts experience, navigate, and imagine space and place. I also learn from, think with, and write about creative Black Geographies, focusing on the interdisciplinary and creative practices through which Black peoples intervene in everyday space through arts-based and cultural practices. Two African-based writings on Blackness formatively shaped my love for Black Geographies: Mpho Matsipa’s 2017 article ‘Woza! Sweetheart! On braiding epistemologies on Bree Street’ and Keguro Macharia’s ‘On Being Area-Studied: A Litany of Complaint.’ These scholars shaped for me a capaciousness in which we think Black African worlds, and they inspired my own work, including this article that I wrote in 2024: ‘Nima’s “incomplete” humans: Storying adolescents black inhabitations in Accra.’ 

 

My entry into geography was shaped by questions I couldn’t stop asking: Why are cities shaped the way they are? Who gets to belong in public space? What histories live within our streets and buildings? Growing up between the US and Nigeria and in my training in urban studies, architecture and geography, I became curious about the politics of space—who moves freely, who is stopped, whose presence is deemed out of place. As a geographer, I pay attention to the ways that space, power, memory, and resistance could be studied—and reimagined—together.

 

My identity as an Igbo diasporan, living between West Africa, the US, and the UK, deeply informs how and why I do geography. I carry with me the knowledges, challenges, joys, and creative practices of Black life across these geographies—and I use these as lenses to interrogate space, spatial injustice, and Black possibility. Being positioned in Black Geographies allows me to name, centre, and celebrate how Black communities make life and space, even in the wake of enslavement and colonialism.

 

I’m especially proud of my current project, Grafting Black Ecological Life in Edinburgh, because it’s a deeply personal and political undertaking. It emerges from my position at the University of Edinburgh, where I teach Black Geographies in a building historically tied to Caribbean plantation slavery. Through archival autoethnography, embodied plant-based art, and site-specific installation, I’m working to honour enslaved ancestors and imagine what repair can look like within an academic institution. The project is as much about grief and historical legacies as it is about how we live and make our present.

I’ve always grounded my scholarship in community, whether that’s been youth photographers in Ga Mashie (Accra), street vendors in Kumasi and Durban, or Black and Brown communities in South Yorkshire and Edinburgh. My Igbo heritage and diasporic experience also guide my methods—particularly in my Worldmaking through the Black Spatial Poetics of Igbo Masquerade project, where I draw on masquerade as a spatial, poetic, and spiritual practice. My work constantly weaves the personal, political, and cultural—because for me, they are inseparable.

Geography can start by truly reckoning with its own complicity in colonial and racial projects. That means transforming what we teach, how we teach, and who gets to be cited, centred, and heard. It also means creating space for methodologies that reflect Black ways of knowing—oral histories, embodiment, poetry, speculative practices, and site-based collaborations. Geography needs to stop seeing Black life as just a “case study” and instead recognize Black geographies as theoretical, political, and imaginative ground.

 

Being a Black geographer means working from a place of deep responsibility—to ancestors, to community, and to future generations. It means refusing to separate knowledge from lived experience and choosing to centre Black life not only as a subject of study, but as a source of theory, worldmaking, and beauty. It means building classrooms and research spaces where critical thinking and creative practice can co-exist, and where we can imagine otherwise together.

Ask questions; a meaningful Igbo proverb for me is this one: Onye ajụjụ anaghị efu ụzọ (“the person who asks questions doesn’t lose their way”). Let your lived experience and your positionality shape your unique contributions to theory. Be curious, be critical, and stay open to collaboration—with communities, with other disciplines, with forms of knowledge that don’t always look “academic.” And most importantly, trust that your perspective matters—geography needs you.