Dr. Grace Adeniyi-Ogunyankin

Canada Research Chair in Youth and African Urban Futures

I obtained my Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in Psychology and Global Development Studies from Queen’s University in 2005. I also completed my Master of Public Administration degree from Queen’s University in 2006. I received my PhD in Gender, Feminist and Women’s Studies from York University in 2014.

Credentials
•    BAH/MPA (Queen’s University)
•    PhD (York University)  

Links: GenUrb: Urbanization, Gender, and the Global South

Research Interests

I am a feminist scholar who is interested in African urban futures and black futurity. I do urban ethnography work concerning issues of gender, spirituality, spatial exclusions and financial inclusion. I also have a research focus on popular culture, both on the continent and in the diaspora, that explores the issues of subjectivity and belonging and the use of Afrofuturism and Afropolitan Imagineering in geographic projects that address the politics of difference.

I am currently working on the following projects:

1. Youth and Neoliberal Urban Change in Lagos and Ibadan, Nigeria: This research examines the gendered dimensions of youth psychosocial well-being, emotionality of social life in the city, urban consumption spaces and practices, and investor subjectivities in Lagos and Ibadan. Specifically, I aim to provide a critical understanding of youth’s sense of place and how they interact with an environment marked by neoliberal change, spatial inequality and consumption. The research focuses on:   i) gender, power and emotional labour in service sector industries that have created employment opportunities, as a result of deepening financialization, global investment and tourism; and ii) the cultivation of investor subjectivities in consumption spaces that are produced and reproduced as social spaces of upward social mobility and self-invention. 
2. Urbanization, Gender and the Global South (Co-investigator, SSHRC Partnership Grant, 2017-2023):  This research is being conducted in seven cities - Ibadan, Nigeria, Georgetown, Guyana, Cochabamba, Bolivia, Mumbai, India, Cairo, Egypt, Shanghai, China, and Ramallah, Palestine. I am the team lead of the Ibadan project. The study explores how urban growth, in conjunction with neoliberalism, has raised issues around the making of social contracts between urban residents, cities and states, and of the urgent need for practical engagements with transnational feminist social justice work in the urban context.

Curriculum Vitae (pdf, 223kB)