Ounjẹ daradara lawọ ara:
Good food and its effect on the body
My research interest is in Media studies and my ‘recently’ published (2012) book is “Diaspora and imagined Nationality: USA-Africa Dialogue and Cyberframing Nigerian Nationhood“, published by Carolina Academic Press. The book focuses on how the concept of nationalism is discussed by geographically displaced Nigerians across the World Wide Web. It may not be explicit about how Africans in general survive outside of their homeland; the book definitely speaks to how to harvest the thoughts of Africans in different locations around the world. The methods deployed in the publication definitely came in very handy during the research phase of these collaborations. I had the opportunity, a few years ago, to visit Osijek, Croatia and Makeni, Sierra Leone to experience first-hand how the different communities were coping with the aftermath of war and the role of creative arts and artists in the very different socio-economic societies.
I served as the president of South East African Languages & Literatures Forum (SEALLF). I am also a member (in spirit) of the Association of Nigerian Authors and a founding member of the Coalition of Nigerian Artists. While working as a photojournalist, I coordinated the film viewers’ forum for the Goethe Institute in Lagos, Nigeria. Now I am, is a language teacher at the University of Florida. I am a poet who combines theory and practice of photojournalism, and environmental activism.
I trained first as a Botanist (81-84) and much later received the British Council Chevening scholarship to study for a master’s degree in TV/video for Development from the University of Reading, United Kingdom. I earned another master’s degree in Organizational Communication at Ithaca College, NY. Finally, I obtained a PhD in media studies from Rutgers University, NY.
And Then… Negotiating acts of communion through consumption
Job launched her independent career as a choreographer-dancer in 1994. Since then, she has conceived, directed, choreographed and performed more than 70 full-length works, produced interdisciplinary collaborations in various places across the globe. job’s practice has been eclectic and largely informed by non-Western aesthetics. She finds particular synergy with Japanese philosophies related to ways of inhabiting the world with restraint and a sense of serving the other. Her interests lie in developing performance modalities that regard imbalance, invisibility and vulnerability as provocative qualities to construct identity. Currently, Job is a Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies at the University of Cape Town, and remains active as a choreographer, dancer and academic researcher.
Jacki Job’s most recent oeuvre is inspired by the teachings of the praying mantis and resists centralising the Anthropocene in re-imagining perceptions of bodies in physical and social terms. The film, And Then… challenges our learnt sense of embodiment, matter, human experience, freedom and intimacy. Danced in her signature butoh-esque style, its relevance to “critical food studies” is oblique but profound. It thinks through strategies of building relationality and dissolving barriers by consuming what is different. The dance prompts aesthetic, philosophical and metaphysical provocations around – inter alia – what it means to “eat” or be “eaten”, what “needs” the human body has, how the human body is usually situated in (and can resist) a hierarchy in which matter and other species are instrumentalised and made passive. She is accompanied on piano by José Dias.
