Orchestra and Asake’s Organize: New Publication Alert!

For years, I laughed at the conductor who stood before the orchestra with a baton and made various gestures. If we were honest, we could agree that some of them can be extra.

However, a few years ago, it occurred to me that there is an affinity between the conductor and research and writing procedures. From a reductionist lens, much of the research is conducting, organizing, explaining, challenging, inventing, and reinventing. Also, we both seek to bring disparate ideas, tools, and methods together to produce harmony or a symphony of thought for different audiences/disciplines. The conductor uses his baton to marshal different voices and instruments and signals what and who follows in the order they rehearse.

Along these lines, when people ask me what I do for a living, different answers come to mind, but one that I imagine doing but never do is singing Asake’s song “Organize” from the Mr Money Album. Asake sings, “Organize every other day I organize.” I organize or conduct an orchestra of ideas, mixing, matching, explaining, and articulating.

For my research brief,

For my first doctoral dissertation, I organize through a feminist interpretive lens how democracy does not always easily translate into gender equality and how various forms of advocacy are brought to the fore to challenge the dissonance between the promise of democracy for women’s rights and the reality of women’s experience. Put differently, I organize how international legal and local frameworks on women’s rights align and collide, showing the compelling, complex, and complicated ways that various forms of advocacy seek to entrench the promise of gender gains that democracy purports.

In my research on celebrity, I organize a multidisciplinary lens to explore how the economy and politics of attention shape race, gender, and sexuality in Africa and the African Diaspora.

For my ongoing second doctoral dissertation, I make three interconnecting arguments:

First, I organize an explanatory schema on why the overriding image of popular music is masculine, with Fela, Sikiru Ayinde Barrister, and other male artists as icons.

Secondly, ⁠I organize/ orchestrate multiple sources to give visibility to women and queer artists who seem silenced to give popular music a masculine image.

Third, the rest of my dissertation organizes an understanding of the politics and poetics of Queer and women’s artists to the masculine aura of popular music.

My latest patient, Bread, Orchestra, is now published in the African Studies Review. In this book, the author organizes ways African artists appropriate hip-hop tenets to create a unique genre of African hip-hop or Hip Hop in Africa that speaks to socio-economic realities, political issues, and more.

While writing about organizing, what and how are we organizing to free Dele Farotimi?

In your profession, what do you organize?

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