Two Students Awarded Ebrahim Hussein Fellowships

PhD students Vincent Ogoti and Astou Gueye have been awarded Ebrahim Hussein fellowships to support their research.

Vincent OgotiVincent Ogoti’s project is tentatively titled, “Space Traitors: The Politics and Poetics of Performing Violence in Kenya.”  It is primarily concerned with how theatre practitioners make sense of violence, how they deploy violence in their works, and what violence enables them to achieve. The project also investigates how the audience might see and read violence in the aesthetic conventions of theatre and drama.

Ogoti examines theatre created in the early post-colonial period alongside contemporary theatre that engages the afterlives of violent and traumatic historical acts and events to argue that violence (personal, systemic, structural, cultural, and epistemic) is a fundamental part of the modern Kenyan state.

Focused on gender, language, and sexuality, Astou Gueye investigates the concept of jonge, a performance of Senegalese womanhood. Through feminist ethnographic methodology, Gueye examines how women engage with jonge to find ways through the gendered expectations of their society. By making sense of this cultural practice among contemporary Senegalese women, she aims to think through the language and theories that emanate from it.