Invitation - Conference "Nocturnal Lagos: In the searchlight of a police cruiser"

On 4 December 2025, the Institute of African Studies (University of Ibadan) and IFRA-Nigeria will hold the first conference of their Imagine(d) Africa series. Dr Chrystel Oloukoï, assistant professor of Geography at the University of Washington, received their PhD in African Studies from Harvard University in 2024 and will be the guest speaker. Their talk, entitled "Nocturnal Lagos: In the searchlight of a police cruiser" will interrogate what a (post)colonial obsession with nighttime as a spacetime of regulation, teaches us about colonial and postcolonial sovereignty.

While sex workers, gender non-conforming subjects, night revelers and low-income residents have long been the primary targets of state-sanctioned violence, the pandemic-related 2020 large scale curfews and lockdowns have expanded the scope of police brutality, and fractured the hegemony of a “security bargain” between the ruling classes and the population. Disassembling the myriad formal and informal “violence workers” which exercise at night, a hydra headed “nightwatch state”, with proliferating arms, but shaky feet, they contend that nighttime operates as a category of anxiety, displacement for nervous, paranoid states and provides a window into the nature of the contemporary “state-effect.”

Practical information

Location: online conference

Date & Time: 4 December 2025, 4-6pm (WAT)

Sign-up before 03/12: https://forms.gle/inVN5fRFnv1uzBR79

Biography

Chrystel Oloukoï is an Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Washington.  They hold a PhD in African and African American Studies from Harvard University with a secondary field in Critical Media Practice. Their research and interests are at the intersection of black studies, political economy, abolition geographies and queer theory. Their book project, black nocturnal: insurgent ecologies of the night in Lagos, examines imaginations of the night, nocturnal environments, black ecologies, and the afterlives of colonial technologies of temporal discipline.