Gabriela A.K.I. Sealy

rebsl — Thu, 08 Feb 2024 20:14:23 +0000

Gabriela Sealy is a researcher, curator, and maker who works at the seams of memory, material, and care. Rooted in the textile traditions of the African diaspora, her work stitches together oral history, archival fragments, and creative practice to trace what survives and who carries it. She recently completed her MA in Art History and Visual Culture at 91��ɫ, where her Major Research Project, The Black Pollera: Stitches of Survival, Threads of Legacy, explored the pollera de Congo as both a garment and a living archive of Afro-Panamanian matriarchal knowledge.

Gabriela’s practice moves between storytelling and scholarship, threading the personal with the political. Guided by the hands of those who came before, she uses cloth not just as a medium, but as a method—to touch the past, to imagine otherwise, and to hold space for what has been passed down. A SSHRC-funded scholar, she brings her training in curatorial work, conservation, and cultural heritage to projects that honour community, creativity, and intergenerational legacy.

Keywords: Black feminist material culture, Afro-Caribbean textile traditions, Research-creation, Decolonial methodologies, Cultural memory, Embodied knowledge, Oral history, Diasporic storytelling, Textile as archive, Intergenerational care, Visual culture, Ancestral knowledge, Craft-based resistance, Community-engaged art, Afro-Panamanian identity

Damilola Adebayo

rebsl — Sat, 13 Nov 2021 15:15:03 +0000

Damilola Adebayo is an Associate Professor of History and a faculty member in the Graduate Program in Science and Technology Studies (STS). He serves as Vice President of the Canadian Association of African Studies and Associate Editor of History and Technology. An award-winning historian of Anglophone West Africa, particularly Nigeria, his research and teaching lie at the intersection of the history of technology, socioeconomic life, and the role of international organizations in Africa. His work examines the socioeconomic life of Western technologies in African cities since the mid-nineteenth century, with particular attention to the varied contexts in which energy, communication, and transportation technologies were introduced, adopted, appropriated, hybridised, reinvented, or discarded by both elite and everyday users, and to how these technologies have been both a cause and an effect of economic, social, and political change in African societies. His work has earned international recognition, including the Maurice Daumas Prize, awarded by the International Committee for the History of Technology (ICOHTEC) for the best article in the history of technology, and the Bernard S. Finn IEEE History Prize, awarded by the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) for the best article on the history of electrotechnology. His prize-winning scholarship has appeared in leading historical journals, including Past & Present. He earned a BA in History from the University of Ibadan, an MA in International History from the Geneva Graduate Institute, and a PhD in History from the University of Cambridge, where he was a Cambridge-Africa Scholar and recipient of the IEEE Life Members' Fellowship in the History of Electrical and Computing Technology. His book project, Power and the People: Electricity and Urban Life in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Nigeria, contributes to broader debates on infrastructure, urbanization, development, state power, modernity, and energy inequality.

Keywords: African history, Nigerian history, history of technology, energy history, infrastructure, transportation, communication technologies, socioeconomic history, urban history, environmental history, international organisations, development, colonialism and postcolonialism, transnational history, public history, oral history, historical GIS, digital humanities

Oral History | The Harriet Tubman Institute

Gabriela A.K.I. Sealy

Damilola Adebayo