The UI Don is one of eight professors selected globally to undertake research on a range of issues, including food system models to resolve climate issues and exploration of West African communities’ history through museum collections.
The Global Professorships is a large investigator-led grant aimed at attracting internationally recognized scholars to the United Kingdom to undertake cutting-edge research projects across a diverse range of relevant disciplines. Each four-year award provides funding of £900,000 to the selected professors.
Professor Adesina, who also serves as President of the Society of Nigerian Archivists, will focus his research on “the interplay of nationalist historiography, academic social science, and vernacular knowledge as mutually constitutive social epistemologies.”
He will investigate to what extent the work of academic historians and social scientists at the University of Ibadan was shaped by indigenous, vernacular epistemologies.
“The city of Ibadan had its own, rich and distinctive, cultural and intellectual identity. This project studies for the first time the interplay of nationalist historiography, academic social science, and vernacular knowledge as mutually constitutive social epistemologies.
“The project combines a close study of key works in history and related disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, ethnomusicology, language and literature with extensive interviews and fieldwork in the city of Ibadan, Southwest Nigeria,” the announcement by the Academy on the UI Don’s proposed research read.
