Dr. Victoria Ogoegbunam Okoye
Lecturer in Black Geographies
- Institute for Geography and the Lived Environment (RIGLE)
- School of GeoSciences
- College of Science and Engineering
Contact details
- Email: victoria.okoye@ed.ac.uk
Address
- Street
-
Room 2.27, Institute of Geography
Drummond Street
Edinburgh EH8 9XP - City
- Post code
Availability
In Spring 2026 semester, my office hours are Tuesdays and Wednesdays, 4-5pm
Background
Dr Victoria Ogoegbunam Okoye is a Lecturer in Black Geographies in the School of Geosciences at the University of Edinburgh. Her research examines Black spatial practices, African urbanism, and creative methods in human geography, with focus in Ghana, Nigeria, and the UK. She uses interdisciplinary and arts-based methods and site-specific spatial interventions to explore how Black communities produce place, spatial knowledges, and embodied, ecological relations. Her work contributes to human geography, Black geographic thought, urban studies, and decolonial spatial theory.
Areas of research:
Global Black geographies, African urbanisms, Creative and arts-based spatial research, Black spatial practices, Coloniality and decolonizing geography, African and African diaspora spatial practices, Urban cultural practices and everyday urbanisms, Archival and creative research methods, and Black ecological life
Research approach:
Victoria Ogoegbunam Okoye's work centers the global production of Blackness in African and African diaspora geographies and the inventive cultural and spatial practices through which Black peoples produce Black life, reconfigure space, and produce ways of knowing our spatial worlds. She attends to Blackness and Black geographies in the afterlife of the interconnected global projects of enslavement and colonialism, focusing on the everyday production of space.
Her career trajectory is informed and shaped through diverse collaborations and learnings with urban residents, artists, and creatives’ practices of shaping urban life: from street vending, street festivals, and youth photography workshops and exhibitions (Accra, Ghana), to devising water, sanitation and design interventions in urban markets, in collaboration with vendors, activists, architects, and community leaders (Durban, South Africa; Kumasi, Ghana; Lagos, Nigeria).
More recently, her work has spanned collaborative archival research digging into histories of Black and Brown presence (South Yorkshire, UK) as well as the University of Edinburgh’s own connections to Caribbean plantation enslavement through site-specific arts practice, linked to her Black Geographies research and teaching. Her work draws on and has produced oral histories, embodied, speculative, and creative writing and poetry, visual documentation (photography, body mapping, other mapping practices), and site-specific, practice-based creative artworks and interventions.
Her approach to research, teaching, learning, and other University activities is informed by my identity as an Igbo diasporan and lived experiences and trajectories moving between and across West Africa, the US and the UK, as well as past and present collaborations with artists, creatives, youth and peers and training in urban studies, design and planning.
Qualifications
PhD, Urban Studies and Planning, University of Sheffield (UK)
Masters, Urban Planning + International Affairs, Columbia University (US)
Bachelors Degrees, International (African and Latin American) Studies + Journalism, University of Missouri (US)
Undergraduate teaching
Over the past two decades, I've taught in a range of roles and environments: from tutoring university students, to teaching and working in after-school programs, to developing creative learning programs for students (like architecture writing workshops), to university teaching for undergraduate and masters students.
At the University of Edinburgh, I teach on a range of undergraduate courses in the the undergraduate Geography MA program, as course organiser (Black Geographies) and through meaningful contributions as part of a teaching team. Across these courses, I emphasize critically and creatively learning from African and African Diaspora scholarship, theorising with a wide range of knowledge materials and texts, and thinking across geographies in local-global relation to re-story how we know our everyday worlds. This includes reading, listening, watching, and otherwise learning from a range of interdisciplinary knowledge materials, sources and knowledge holders.
- Human Geography (1st year course)
- Fieldwork in Human Geography (Belfast, Northern Ireland) (3rd year course)
- Black Geographies 3rd and 4th year honors option course)
- Dissertation in Human Geography (4th year course)
Open to PhD supervision enquiries?
Yes
Areas of interest for supervision
I'm keen to supervise potential PhD researchers with shared research interests in the following areas: (Global) Black geographies, African urbanisms, Creative and arts-based spatial research, (Black) African and African diaspora spatial practices, Urban cultural practices and everyday urbanisms, Archival and creative research methods, and Black ecological life.
Supervising Black Geography PhD researchers in the UK: Towards Good Practice Guidelines: PhD funding is incredibly important, deeply competitive, and aspiring Black PhD researchers are the most likely to be self-funded. As you embark on your PhD journey, please take a look at this report that I wrote (towards the end of my own PhD), which includes important research, guidelines, and key things to think about as you prepare for your own PhD journey.
Also take a look at this wonderful online PhD application resource, generously provided by Hannah Robbins.
Current PhD students supervised
Amina Lawal Agoro, PhD in History of Art, University of Glasgow - "Trace Elements: a curatorial approach to the reconstitution of late 19th century 'vernacular' architecture in Lagos, Nigeria"
Project activity
Current Projects
Grafting Black Ecological Life in Edinburgh (UK):
Drawing on the horticultural practice of grafting, this research advances a conceptual approach and creative methodology that advances Black ecological life. The project interrogates the Institute of Geography's entangled ecological connections to Caribbean plantation enslavement and honors enslaved ancestors through a project of repair, which includes practices of archival autoethnography, embodied artmaking with plantlife, and site-specific installation within the building.
Worldmaking through the Black spatial poetics of Igbo masquerade (Nigeria):
This interdisciplinary project weaves together creative and qualitative methods to explore Igbo masquerade in southeastern Nigeria as a Black, poetic, world-making spatial practice. Bringing together poetry, drama, interviews, and sensory ethnography, this project analyses the masquerade's poetic and performative meanings as spatial expressions.
Past Projects:
Unearth Untold Stories: Dig Where You Stand Educational Resource Pack
Working with the South Yorkshire Dig Where You Stand Project, I produced an educational resource aimed at making the untold stories of people of colour more accessible to local people. This educational resource pack was grounded in DWYS' 2021 exhibition and archival research and grouped into four sections: children; buildings, place & space; work; and artists & entertainers. I contributed to the archival research through written narratives and text and the development of educational activities that encourage schools, community groups, young people and others to think critically and creatively about their histories of place. More info and to access the resource pack: https://www.dwys.co.uk/resources/education-pack
Akwaaba Photo: Youth Photography Workshop and Exhibition (Accra, Ghana)
This youth photography workshop and exhibition, organized and produced with No Limits Charity and Channelle Nicole Frazier, was a creative project to engage adolescents in Ga Mashie neighborhood in creative arts, by engaging them within their own community. This activity was part of a concerted effort to support their creative expression through photographic imagery, to encourage them to share their views, perspectives and insights in an open, safe and welcoming space.
The three-part photography skills workshop series was a skills building workshop focused on camera photography, including the mechanics of the camera photography, choosing subjects, and framing. Each workshop session included an introduction and training to photography techniques and principles for each child, followed by a two-hour community exploration and photography, and finally a one-hour recap session during which each child presented his/her photos and received feedback from the group.
The adolescents exhibited their work in their local community on Saturday, January 14, 2017 at Jamestown Cafe. The photographs included in the exhibition were selected by the adolescents themselves. At the exhibition, each adolescent presented his/her work to the audience and shared his/her story, motivations in photography and insights from the photographs she/he captured. More: https://akwaaba.photography/about/
Past project grants
Royal Society of Edinburgh Small Grant (2025-2026)
Moray Endowment Fund Grant (2025)
Okoye, V.O. (2025). Feeling through “incomplete” spiritual-space-times. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 46(1), 22–26. https://doi.org/10.1111/sjtg.12561
Okoye, V.O. (2024). Nima's “Incomplete” humans: Storying adolescents’ Black inhabitations in Accra. Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.13064
Okoye, V.O. (2024). Decolonizing feminist urban research. In Handbook on Gender and Cities (pp. 400–410). Edward Elgar Publishing.
Okoye, V., Juliet, S.-A., Michael, B., Fisher, A. M., & Biamah-Ofosu, N. (2022). Navigating architectural education spaces as Black students, researchers, and educators. Field: The Free Journal of Architecture, 8(1), 123–132.
Okoye, V.O. (2022). Book Review: Katherine McKittrick’s Dear Science and Other Stories. Antipode Journal. https://antipodeonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Dear-Science-forum_Victoria-Ogoegbunam-Okoye.pdf
Okoye, V.O. (2021). The colonial afterlife of encroachment. L’Internationale Online. https://www.internationaleonline.org/contributions/the-colonial-afterlife-of-encroachment/
Okoye, V.O. (2021). Black digital outer spaces: Constellations of relation and care on Twitter. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 46(4), 806-809. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12495
Okoye, V.O. and Aminu, Y.L. (2021). Planning, community spaces, and youth urban futures, from Accra. In Michele Lancione and Colin McFarlane (eds.) Thinking Global Urbanism: Essays on the City and its Future. London, UK: Routledge.
Okoye, V. (2021). Fakery and fabrications in Kumasi’s “modern” market. Journal of African Cultural Studies, 33(3), 370–376. https://doi.org/10.1080/13696815.2021.1950523
Hart, J., Okoye, V. O., and Oduro-Frimpong, J. (2021). On collaboration and communication “in the now.” Africa Today, 67(4), 88-94. https://doi.org/10.2979/africatoday.67.4.06
Journal Issue Editor
Cheatle, E., Hernan, L., Butterworth, C., Okoye, V.O. and Moreno, C.M. (2022). Field: Journal, Issue No. 8: Embodying an Anti-Racist Architecture.
Research Reports
Okoye, V.O. (2021). Supervising Black geography PhD researchers in the UK: Towards good practice guidelines. RGS-IBG RACE Working Group. https://raceingeography.org/2021/09/22/report-supervising-black-geography-phd-researchers-in-the-uk/
Okoye, V.O. (2020). Street vendor exclusion in “modern” market planning: A case study from Kumasi, Ghana (WIEGO Resource Document No. 15). Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO). https://www.wiego.org/research-library-publications/street-vendor-exclusion-modern-market-planning-case-study-kumasi-ghana/
Okoye, V.O., Sands, J. and Debrah, A. (2010). The Accra Pilot Bus-Rapid Transit project: Transport-Land Use Research Study. Columbia University Earth Institute’s Millennium Cities Initiative.
Public Scholarship & Creative Publications
Okoye, V.O. (2025). Unearth Untold Stories: Dig Where You Stand Educational Resource Pack. https://www.dwys.co.uk/resources/education-pack
Okoye, V.O. (2023). Grafting flowers, ancestors & dreams: A contribution to the programme “Black Presence: A dialogue with Azeezat Johnson's legacy”. Geographies of Embodiment Research Collective. https://gemcollective.org/ongoing-projects/black-presence/
Okoye, V.O. (2019). "Becoming Local: (Hi)Stories of 'Nigerians' in Accra." The Metropole: The Official Blog of the Urban History Association. https://themetropole.blog/2019/12/16/becoming-local-histories-of-nigerians-in-accra/