IAS-UI Will Be at Prof Obono’s Faculty Seminar at Social Sciences

IAS-UI Will Be at Prof Obono’s Faculty Seminar at Social Sciences

Our Institute has been invited to the Faculty Seminar to be given by Prof Oka Obono at the Faculty of the Social Sciences on the topic ‘Quantum Redirections and the “Field” in Global Social Science’.

A collegial friend of IAS-UI, Prof Obono needs no introduction. His work spans a decadeslong trajectory in teaching, research, publication, policymaking, community development interventions, public intellection, journalism, consultancies with NGOS and INGOs, including leading expert projects with the UN, the WHO, the EU, OSIWA, etc., and a host of activities in other fields involving town-gown engagements. Apart from the distinction of being Africa’s first professor of ethnodemography, Prof Obono’s disciplinary interests encompass population studies, the sociology of mobility, the sociology of sexualities, methodologies and meta-theory in the broad social sciences and humanities, ethnoliterature, as well as the sociology of peace and conflict, interests which he has pursued in his career in the global academy across universities in Africa, the United States, and Europe.

Permanently engaged with destructive-creative dialectics, as explored in his collection, Shadrach and Other Poems, and in the pathbreaking publication ‘Reflections on the “Field” in Post-War Sociology’, Prof Obono is uniquely placed to elaborate on, respecify, and lead us in an excursion into new thinkings and experiences about the fraught concept and reality of the ‘field’ and what happens when the social sciences reinvent themselves.

As our Institute attends this seminar, we are also inviting, on behalf of Prof Obono and the Faculty of the Social Sciences, members of the university community and the general public to make it a date with us.

The date is 19 August, 2026, time 10:00 a.m. sharp, at the Large Lecture Theatre, Faculty of the Social Sciences.