Wumi Asubiaro Dada co-organized a series of Lunch & Learn workshops with Professor Grace Adeniyi-Ogunyankinat, Canada Research Chair in Youth and African Urban Futures, at the Canadian Association of African Studies' 2024 Annual Conference (CAAS 2024) which took place in Montreal from June 12 to16, 2024.
The invitation to help organize the workshop series came from Professor Adeniyi-Ogunyankinat after Wumi moderated a virtual professional development workshop entitled From PhD to Professor in October 2023. Many of the participants in that workshop expressed high interest in similar workshops. Wumi was then asked to help organize workshops for the CAAS 2024 Annual Conference.
She co-organized a series of seven workshops which were offered at the conference:
- June 12-13: Ready, Set, job offer!
- Workshops on preparing applications for academic and non-academic jobs.
- June 14: Epistemic (t)errors and injustices?
- A pedagogy workshop that centred the decolonial teaching of Africa in the classroom and offered an opportunity to workshop teaching statements.
- June 15: Surviving academia as a Black woman: A conversation
- A discussion of how Black women are presumed incompetent and the social reproductive work they do in academia. It was an open space for attendees to discuss their experience and offer tips on navigating the academy while prioritizing their well-being.
Beyond the skills and knowledge shared, the space served as a mentoring hub for graduate students and emerging scholars. During the workshop, scholars engaged in critical conversations about decolonizing curriculum in Canada.
The workshop series was the first of its kind at a CAAS Annual Conference and attracted over one hundred participants.
For me as an emerging scholar, one of the key takeaways from the workshop on epistemic (t)errors and injustices was a suite of methods and approaches shared by panelists on ways of acknowledging diversity within African societies (e.g., resisting continent-wide generalizations and stereotypes). I was challenged as a Nigerian to avoid such generalizations.
More importantly, the workshops fostered a stronger sense of belonging amongst graduate students and emerging scholars in academia. The importance of the workshops is underscored by the reality most of the graduate students/emerging scholars who are members of CAAS are Africans, which means they are among the most racialized and marginalized groups. Having the opportunity to connect with other scholars during big conferences has proved valuable and I have made lasting connections with scholars in North America.
- Wumi Asubiaro Dada
Wumi was a PhD candidate (Supv: Professor Kamari Clarke) at CrimSL when she led the workshops last June. She successfully defended her doctoral thesis “Mai Kariya (Female Protectors): The Evolving Role of Women in Conflict in Kaduna State, Nigeria," on September 27, 2024, and is now a postdoctoral fellow at CrimSL.