The Department of African Cultural Studies is pleased to announce that Ernesta Cole and Tobi Idowu have been awarded the Aliko Songolo Summer Research Award, which supports outstanding graduate research in African and diasporic cultural, linguistic, and media studies.
Both projects center questions of language, culture, and belonging across African and diasporic contexts, and reflect the department’s commitment to interdisciplinary, globally engaged scholarship.
Ernesta Cole: Krio, Diaspora, and Creolizing Knowledge
Ernesta Cole’s dissertation, Creolizing Knowledge Production: Diasporic Sierra Leonean Krio, examines how Sierra Leonean Krio—a creole language and central marker of identity—is practiced, preserved, and reimagined by diasporic Sierra Leonean communities in the United States.
Drawing on African Cultural Studies and linguistic anthropology, Cole’s project argues that diasporic Krio speakers are not simply experiencing cultural or linguistic loss, but are actively producing forms of belonging grounded in what she describes as “Kriodom”: a relational and practiced framework of identity that transcends geographic boundaries.
Her research traces the historical emergence of Krio in Sierra Leone through the convergence of West African, Caribbean, Nova Scotian, and Gullah communities, and extends this history into the present through contemporary diasporic life. The United States, home to some of the most established Sierra Leonean communities globally, provides the primary field site for her study.
This summer, Cole will conduct multi-sited fieldwork across Minnesota, Maryland, Virginia, and the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. Her research will include semi-structured interviews, oral histories, participant observation, and digital ethnography within church communities, cultural associations, and informal social networks. Across these sites, she will examine how Krio is transmitted between generations, and how language practices shape diasporic identity in everyday life.
Cole’s project is poised to make a significant contribution as the first book-length study of contemporary diasporic Krio usage, offering new insight into creolization, language vitality, and knowledge production in African diasporas.
Tobi Idowu: Afrobeats and Africana Intimacies
Tobi Idowu’s dissertation, Africana Intimacies: Media, Popular Music, and the Cultural Politics of Afrobeats, explores the global rise of Afrobeats and the cultural, media, and political conditions that have shaped its circulation between Africa and its diasporas.
His research examines how Afrobeats emerged in Nigeria during periods of media and economic transformation and how it has since become a global cultural formation through digital platforms, industry infrastructures, and diasporic performance spaces. Central to his project is the concept of “Africana intimacies,” which describes the affective and social relations—such as belonging, aspiration, and recognition—produced through popular music across African and diasporic publics.
Idowu’s summer research will combine archival work in Nigeria with field-based observation in U.S. cities including Madison, Chicago, and Atlanta. His project engages broadcast and print media archives, interviews with cultural producers, and participation in Afrobeats-centered events and nightlife spaces. Together, these materials trace how the genre is shaped by both historical developments in Nigerian media industries and contemporary diasporic circulation.
Through this work, Idowu offers a historically grounded account of Afrobeats as a transnational cultural formation that reorganizes relationships between Africa and its global diasporas under conditions of media globalization and cultural change.
Together, the projects of Cole and Idowu reflect the depth and range of graduate research in the UW-Madison Department of African Cultural Studies. Both scholars bring rigorous interdisciplinary approaches to questions of language, media, and identity, illuminating how African and diasporic communities produce knowledge, culture, and connection across borders.
The department congratulates both recipients on this well-deserved recognition and looks forward to the impact of their research in the years ahead.
The Aliko Songolo Summer Research Award is made possible through the generosity of alumni, donors, and friends. Support helps sustain graduate research in African Cultural Studies.