EWEWA — Conference 2024
  Program
  Participants
  Caterers 
 

Participants

 Damilola Adebayo York University Omolade Adunbi
University of Michigan Doris Agbevivi
Ghana Energy Commission Dela Anyah
Artist Sherwin K. Bryant
Rice University Brenda Chalfin
University of Florida,
Gainesville R. Lane Clark
Filmmaker and artist John Cropper
College of Charleston Aida Diop
National Resource
Governance Institute Shani Evans
Rice University Rosalind Fredericks
New York University Tengi George-Ikoli
National Resource
Governance Institute Gökçe Günel
Rice University Abdoulie Jabang
Texas Christian University
Vivian C. Lu
Rice University
Victoria Massie
Rice University
 Stephan F. Miescher
University of California,
Santa Barbara Shasha Nakhai
Filmmaker
 Nana Osei-Opare
Rice University 
Kwame Otu
Georgetown University
 Rebecca E. Wall
Loyola Marymount University,
Los Angeles
Damilola Adebayo is an award-winning historian of Anglophone West Africa, particularly Nigeria. His research and teaching interests are at the intersection of three historical fields: technology, socioeconomic life, and international organizations. His current research theme investigates the socioeconomic life of Western technologies in African cities since the 1850s. He is keen to understand the varied contexts within which Western energy, communication, and transportation technologies were introduced, used, or discarded by the upper class and everyday people; and how these technologies have been a cause and effect of change in African societies. His ongoing book project is tentatively entitled Power and the People: Electricity and Urban Life in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Nigeria.

Omolade Adunbi is a Professor of Anthropology and Afroamerican and African Studies, Professor of Law (courtesy) and Faculty Associate in the Program in the Environment, PitE at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is a political and environmental anthropologist and his research examines the dynamics of power, natural resource extractive practices, governance, human and environmental rights, culture, transnational institutions, multinational corporations, and the postcolonial state. His latest book, Enclaves of Exception: Special Economic Zones and Extractive Practices in Nigeria (Indiana University Press 2022, finalist and honorable mention for the African Studies Association Best Boo Prize in 2023), offers a new approach to exploring the relationship between oil and technologies of extraction and their interrelatedness to local livelihoods and environmental practices. His previous book, Oil Wealth and Insurgency in Nigeria (Indiana University Press, 2015), addresses issues related to oil wealth, multinational corporations, transnational institutions, NGOs, and violence in the oil-rich Niger Delta region of Nigeria. The book won the Royal Anthropological Society of Great Britain and Ireland’s Amaury Talbot book prize for the best book in the Anthropology of Africa in 2017. His current research engages with questions of climate politics and the ways in which environmental groups and activists use social media to promote their advocacy for the environment. His other project focuses on the growing interest of China in Africa's natural resources and its interrelatedness to infrastructural projects. His teaching interests include transnationalism, globalization, climate politics, social media culture, power, violence, human and environmental rights, the postcolonial state, social theory, resource governance, and contemporary African society, culture, and politics. He is the recipient of the 2022 John Dewey Award for his long-term commitment to undergraduate education. He also received the Class of 1923 Memorial Teaching Award for excellence in teaching in 2016.

Doris Agbevivi is an Energy Analyst and a Yale Climate fellow with about 10 years of experience in clean energy and sustainable development in Ghana and internationally. She has spent the past eight years with the Energy Commission working closely with energy and transport sector stakeholders and informing policymaking in Ghana. Doris has also participated in and led technical knowledge exchange events in Ghana and abroad. She consulted for the World Health Organisation (WHO)’s Urban Health Initiative to analyse the impact of various cooking fuels on health. She is currently the coordinator of the Drive Electric Initiative in Ghana; an e-mobility initiative of the Energy Commission under which she organised the country’s 1st E-mobility Conference and 1st Public Charging Forum to usher in an era of green and sustainable energy use while leading the country’s first EV Baseline study and standards for EV charging and battery swaps. Doris is a passionate advocate for sustainable energy and transport appearing on over 50 conference panels across the world. She holds an MSc in Energy Economics from the University of Aberdeen and a Climate fellowship with Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs.

 
Dela Anyah's artistic practice encompasses sculpture, painting, and installation, where he transforms discarded materials such as inner tubes, tires, license plates, and bicycle rims. Inspired by anti-fashion aesthetics and nature's symbols of rebirth, his work explores regeneration through decay. Dela intricately weaves rubber inner tubes into garments, narrating their past lives and speculative futures. His art reveals the inherent beauty in what was once deemed worthless, creating storied objects rich with history and symbolism. Each piece fosters a dialogue between past and future, challenging viewers to reconsider notions of value and beauty while highlighting the potential for renewal in neglected materials.
Sherwin K. Bryant is a scholar of the African Diaspora whose work addresses the histories of slavery, race and colonial rule stretching from the North Andean territories of modern-day Colombia and Ecuador to the coastal lowlands of North Carolina's lower Cape Fear region that comprise Brunswick and New Hanover Counties. Bryant's first book, Rivers of Gold, Lives of Bondage: Governing through Slavery in Colonial Quito (UNC Press, 2014) explored the political importance of slavery, showcasing the ways that enslaved Africans and their descendants confronted and challenged Spanish colonials efforts to elaborate Atlantic slavery as a system of race governance. Bryant was the 2021-22 ACLS-Mellon Scholar and Society Fellow, whose work with the African American Heritage Foundation of Southeastern North Carolina (AAHFSNC) has led to Just Beyond the River: A Black Black Humanities Initiative, an ongoing, community-engaged research project that includes the forthcoming film Just Across the River.
Brenda Chalfin is Professor of Anthropology and African Studies at the University of Florida. She is the author of 3 books: Waste Works: Vital Politics in Urban Ghana (Duke, 2023); Neoliberal Frontiers: An Ethnography of Sovereignty in West Africa (Chicago 2010) and Shea Butter Republic (Routledge 2004). At the intersection of political and economic anthropology, her research examines state processes, border regions, public life and the governance of material flows, from waste and water to off-shore oil finds, and indigenous commodities. Chalfin’s recent work explores the politics of urban form through the case study of popular responses to infrastructural breakdown in Ghana’s planned city of Tema. She is currently pursuing a new project in partnership with colleagues in Ghana and Uganda addressing plastics, urban water supply and patterns of urban development. Addressing the interface of anthropology, architecture and design, these concerns shape a pedagogy she calls ‘Lateral Anthropology’ exploiting the methodological frictions between Lab, Field, Studio and Archive. During the 2022-23 academic year Chalfin was on sabbatical at Aarhus University. Her collaboration with faculty at Aarhus School of Architecture offers the opportunity to advance her knowledge of studio and design-based inquiry.

R. Lane Clark has directed, shot, and/or edited over a dozen art and documentary films in African contexts. He completed his MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1992. Beginning with a Fulbright Research Grant to work in Ghana documenting Akan culture, Clark frequently returns to make documentaries and to teach.  His films on women’s health in Accra, and the series, Ghana’s Electric Dreams, are available on Vimeo. Clark also produces paintings, photography, projected theater sets, exhibiting widely in the US and Europe. He teaches painting, documentary, and artistic practice in various educational and therapeutic settings.

John Cropper earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and currently serves as an assistant professor of African History at the College of Charleston. His research interests include the history of the environment, development and aid, energy use, and politics in French West Africa. His current book project, entitled From the Field to the Refinery: Energy, Technology, and Infrastructure in Senegal, 1450-2015, explores Senegal’s transition from a pre-industrial organic economy to a modern hybrid energy economy based on fossil fuels, local fuels, and renewable energy
Aida Diop is a geologist with over 15 years of experience in natural resource governance, environment and gender. She is a Senior Program Officer, leading the national program of the Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI) in Senegal. As a Senior Program Officer, Aida helps advance NRGI's governance reform agenda in Senegal, including support to EITI and civil society and media, advocacy on transparency and accountability in the oil and mining sectors, technical assistance, and analysis of the nascent hydrocarbons sector. She also encourages vigorous public narrative on the energy transition and its implications for Senegal's extractive industries and broader economy. Being the only woman in her class, she is a founding member and the president of WIM Senegal and was selected in 2020 as one of the "100 Global Inspirational Women In Mining.”





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