"Infrastructure Imaginaries: Informal Urbanism, Creativity, and Ecology in Lagos, Nigeria"
Charisma Acey, Assistant Professor of City & Regional Planning
Ivy Mills, Lecturer in History of Art
Tuesday, October 9, 2018
12-1:30pm
170 Wurster
Part of the Global Urban Humanities Colloquium The City and Its People, Rhetoric 198-3 / ARCH 198-2, Rhetoric 244A / ARCH 298-2
Charisma Acey is an assistant professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning. Her background includes work, research and travel to countries in West Africa, southern Africa and Central America. Her work focuses on local and regional environmental sustainability, with a focus on poverty reduction, urban governance and access to basic services. Her work relies on both quantitative and participatory, qualitative research approaches to understanding individual and household demand for improved infrastructure and environmental amenities. Current and past research projects, teaching and service learning courses have focused on addressing barriers to sustainable development such as human-environment interactions at multiple scales in urban areas around the world, poverty and participatory approaches to governance and development, the financing and sustainability of publicly provided services and utilities, local and regional food systems, environmental justice, and urbanization domestically and globally.
Ivy Mills is a lecturer in the Visual and Literary Cultures of Africa and the African Diaspora in the History of Art Department at the University of California, Berkeley. She conducted Fulbright-funded research on Senegalese cultural production and taught university courses during a four-year residency in Dakar, Senegal; she then completed her PhD in UCB's African Diaspora Studies program in 2011. Her first book project, provisionally titled Iconographies of Exclusion: Gender, Animality, and the Limits of Community in Senegalese Visual Culture, argues that contemporary figurations of abjection and violability cohere through a referencing of the logics and symbols of older Wolof hierarchies of caste and slavery. In this tradition, the limits of humanness – and therefore of communal protection – are imagined through queer, socially dead figures like the hyena and donkey. Other research interests include comedic whiteface performance; the visualization of gendered piety and virtue in Wolof melodrama and contemporary Senegalese art; ecology and sacred architecture in urban visual culture; and popular cultural flows between Senegal and India. She co-curated the Bernice L. Brown Gallery exhibition Love across the Global South: Popular Cinema Cultures of India and Senegal, and has moderated conversations with artists and curators for the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco and the Berkeley Art Museum.
This talk is also the topic of the Graduate Interdisciplinary Research Studio for Spring 2019. Graduate students interested in this studio should attend this talk and stay an extra 30 minutes for a brief info session on the Lagos studio. Students may also attend another studio info session listed on the Events + Deadlines Calendar.
See the full Fall 2018 Global Urban Humanities Colloquium Schedule