JMS Network
Date: Thursday 29 January 2026
Time: 18:00 - 20:00
Venue: Kelvin Hall
Category: Public lectures, Social events
Speaker: Dr Victoria Okoye and Amina Lawal-Agoro

We are delighted to welcome Dr Victoria Okoye to our JMS Network Event in conversation with JMS Scholar, Amina Lawal-Agoro.

The JMS Network is a programme of monthly events centring the Black academic experience and the pursuit of knowledge. It serves as a platform to facilitate discussion and to bridge networks outwith the academic landscape. The overall aim of the JMS Network is to create a protected space where curious minds can engage with experts and extend their communities to people from various fields.

Victoria Ogoegbunam Okoye is a researcher, community collaborator, creative, and lecturer in Black geographies at University of Edinburgh. Her work centers the global production of Blackness in African and African diaspora geographies and the inventive cultural and spatial practices through which we, as Black peoples, produce Black life, reconfigure space, and produce ways of knowing our geographic worlds.

Her work attends to Blackness and Black geographies in the afterlife of the interconnected global projects of enslavement and colonialism and takes seriously the ongoing realities of coloniality in the everyday production of space. Her career has spanned work and learnings from West African urban residents, artists, and creatives' practices of shaping urban life - from street vending and other forms of spatial appropriations, to street festivals, and masquerade, and includes more recent collaborative archival work in the UK, digging into histories of Black and Brown presence in South Yorkshire.

Her work draws on and has produced oral histories, speculative writing and poetry, visual documentation (photography, body mapping, other mapping practices), and site-specific, practice-based creative interventions. Her approaches are informed by her training in and teaching urban studies and design, geography, and architecture.

At present, her current work is developing along two trajectories: the first, drawing on the horticultural practice of grafting as conceptual and methodological approach, interrogates her office building (the Institute of Geography's) entangled ecological connections to Caribbean plantation enslavement. Through creative practices, the research honors enslaved ancestors through a project of repair that includes archival autoethnography, embodied artmaking with plantlife, and site-specific installation.

Her second interdisciplinary project weaves together creative and qualitative methods to explore Igbo masquerade in southeastern Nigeria as a Black, poetic, world-making spatial practice, drawing on poetry, drama, and sensory ethnography.

For further information, you can get in touch on JMSPhD@glasgow.ac.uk.

ACCESSIBILITY GUIDES

The AccessAble guide can be found here.

The Kelvin Hall Visual Story can be found here.

A floor plan for the venue is available here.

Other accessibility information

Please note that only assistance dogs are permitted within the building.

Kelvin Hall has a dedicated quiet room that can be used for prayer or for those needing a calm space. It is located on the ground floor beside the Sports Hall, please ask Glasgow Life staff for directions.

Sensory bags which include ear defenders are available for visitors to use during their time in Kelvin Hall. These can be collected from reception.

Accessible toilets

The accessible toilet is located off the main corridor. There is a changing places toilet.

Assistance dogs

Guide and assistance dogs are welcome.

Hearing loop

There is a fixed loop hearing assistance system in the main building. If you use British Sign Language, you can watch their British Sign Language introduction to Kelvin Hall.

Wheelchair access

There is wheelchair and pram access to all public areas using the lifts and there are free wheelchairs available to hire at reception.

More information