On 22 October, we welcome Dr Oladapo Ajayi for a methodological seminar exploring his fieldwork on Fújì music, conducted between 2017 and 2023. This session will adopt a reflective mode to explore the concrete and relational conditions under which the research was produced.
Dr Ajayi will refer specifically to the disciplinary tensions of conducting ethnography on an African popular music genre from within literary studies in a European institution. Furthermore, he will explore the question of shifting positionality that ran through the entire project. As a Yorùbá-speaking Nigerian, he entered the field expecting an insider’s advantage in terms of the ease of shared language, spatial configuration recognition, and culture. However, several moments of the research cast him as an outsider. In some instances, he was the “educated German returnee researcher,” or an alákọ̀wé (the Western-educated person) among many working-class interlocutors. These moments of self-reflexivity also complicated his relational stance to the field, as he realised that his Christian upbringing set him apart from a music culture historically rooted in Yorùbá Muslim working-class community. Therefore, these markers of class, generation, religion, and diasporic affiliation did not simply complicate his access; they actively reshaped it.
This also reveals that “insider” status is neither fixed nor guaranteed by shared ethnicity or language, but is continually exploratory and renegotiated in the field. Dr Ajayi will draw on examples from his research process, including encounters with gatekeepers, patrons, moments of on-the-spot improvisation, and instances of exclusion, to argue that fieldwork on Fújì is best understood as an artisanal practice, shaped by surprise, setback, and constant methodological adjustment rather than the stable execution of a predetermined design.
Practical information:
Date & Time: Thursday, 22 October 2026, between 10am and 12pm
Location: IFRA-Nigeria Resource Centre, Institute of African Studies, University of Ibadan
Register here before 16/10: https://forms.gle/kn8VGPWSpRuaWTFX6
Bio:
Oladapo O. Ajayi obtained a Bachelor’s degree in French from Obafemi Awolowo University in 2010, and a Master’s degree in Intercultural Anglophone Studies from the University of Bayreuth, Germany, in 2016. He completed his PhD in Afrikanistik (African Studies) at the Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies (BIGSAS) in November 2023, with a dissertation on Fújì Music and Everyday Life in the Contemporary Yorùbá Urban Space. He currently works as a Research Fellow II at the Anthropology Unit of the Institute of African Studies, University of Ibadan. His research interests span social and cultural anthropology, urban studies, risk and vulnerability studies, indigenous knowledge systems, popular culture, digital humanities, and gender studies. Alongside research and teaching, Oladapo is actively engaged in community work, particularly in rural communities and among socially disadvantaged populations. He currently serves as Programme Head at the African Rural Interventions Initiative (Africa-RII), where he leads social interventions in access to quality education, curriculum development and skills acquisition, health awareness, and peer support and leadership mentorship for young boys and girls.