DH Spotlight: Kanyinsola Obayan, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow

Photograph of Kanyinsola Obayan, smiling at the camera in an ornate library
Posted July 20, 2022

DH Spotlight: Kanyinsola Obayan, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow

As Dr. Kanyinsola Obayan prepares for her new role as Faculty Lead of Africa Programs at the Lauder Institute of Management & International Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, we caught up to hear more about her time as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow with MIT’s Programs in Digital Humanities.

What brought you to your fellowship research and to MIT?

I had recently earned my PhD in Africana Studies from Cornell, where I completed a dissertation on the Lagos technology ecosystem. But I didn’t have any background at all in tech, I actually initially planned to conduct research on Nigerian returnees from diaspora. However, while conducting pre-dissertation fieldwork, I noticed that a lot of returnees or people who had been in diaspora, whether in the U.K. or U.S., were starting companies. It also happened to align with this major investment by Chan Zuckerberg Initiative into a Nigerian tech startup which has gone on to become a global unicorn. So my dissertation project was very much the result of me just following the people and seeing where that led me. That's how I ended up studying technology.

Because I lacked that background, I had to learn a lot of stuff on my own: learn about the tech lingo, learn about investment, and all that. I knew however that it would be a long-standing project because not so many people are researching technology and Africa. And yet, there is so much happening in the African tech space. So I thought it would be good for me to understand more about technology but in a way that is intuitive for me as a humanistic social scientist.

Digital humanities seemed perfect for me. I found out more about the field and I thought that it would be a great bridge to get me the skill sets that I wanted. MIT also being this bastion of technology, with strong scholarship in STS [Science, Technology, and Society], was also very appealing. It was really the perfect place for me to do my postdoc, bringing together the fields of Africana and STS, and then using the digital to integrate the two. DH was also a way for me to explore new horizons. Africana Studies is essentially interdisciplinary but I’ve really become interdisciplinary in a new way at MIT.

Could you share more about the research questions that you've been grappling with and the scholarly priorities that emerged during your fellowship?

One of my overarching research questions is this notion of African futures. African futures means thinking about possibilities. What are the emerging possibilities on the continent, looking at new social life forms, new modes of life on the continent as ways of reaching and grappling with that future? What does it mean to think of the future from Africa? What does it mean to think of the world from Africa? I like talking about technology, I like to talk about migration, because it foregrounds African agency and how they're making their lives work on their own terms. But I’m essentially using technology and migration as case studies in interrogating these larger questions that I’m thinking about.

Another scholarly priority, and this has taken shape during the course of this fellowship, was the importance of centering Africans and Africa within the fields of DH and STS. Up until very recently, African technology was marginal in the field of STS. I also noticed the same need to include Africa with DH, and I was able to further that agenda of inclusion during the course of my fellowship. I organized a panel in the Spring of 2021 on Amplifying Local Voices, emphasizing the role of countries in the global South within the narrative of DH. As most people know, DH tends to be very dominated by North America and mostly white scholars, so how can we integrate more people of color into that narrative? There's this historical marginalization of Black people in technology, this myth of black technophobia. I see the importance of having Africans and Black people in the field of DH and including their voices.

This emphasis has directly impacted my research as I continue to explore questions of data justice and digital colonialism on the continent. Nowadays, a lot of user data and information is being extracted by big technology companies right now. There's a lot of emerging scholarship and a lot of talk still budding about digital colonialism. I think it's so important that DH and people of color in DH are at the forefront of speaking out about that. I’m now incorporating that critical piece into my work. There's a celebratory narrative of the digital revolution, but what is it doing to the people on the ground? Since starting this fellowship, I pay more attention to these things, and I hope to further that.

Could you share how your Tèkó Archive project took shape?

It started as a very ambitious project of being this digital archive that would document all of Nigerian technology history. It was really ambitious and it's a great idea, but as far as managing a project it was too unwieldy, so I had to hone in. I had two choices to focus on: more of the contemporary data that I already had, or to do additional research and especially archival research. I figured that I already had the contemporary data; let me use this as an opportunity to strengthen and bolster this historical aspect of my research.

My PhD research was primarily ethnographic, but there was a longer and larger history that this narrative is a part of. Most of the popular narratives that we see on the African digital revolution are very much in the present. It’s very much “Oh, the mobile phone came and technology came.” I find that narrative to be ahistorical and problematic because it reproduces a lot of the same narratives of Africa being periphery or derivative in a sense. I'm looking at how can we decenter those narratives and actually re-center Africa.

I’d heard of this little-known personal computer boom that had happened in Lagos, but I didn't have as much information or insight as I wanted. That happened to be the focus of my fellowship, doing a lot of work with the archive and with an article that came out of this work.

I was the primary PI in this project, with the support of Anastasia and Ryaan. The research component started from December 2020 up until September 2021. I collected archival materials with the support of a local research assistant, conducted oral history interviews, and then obviously transcribed, cleaned, and analyzed the data.

Last Fall, I had some UROPs that were working with me on more data cleanup—cleaning up the data, cleaning up the transcriptions, creating the metadata. Then this past spring is where we started building the archive out, plugging in the pieces, uploading. This summer we’ve been improving the visual design and making it more interactive. The archive as it stands has over 400 items, but it will grow. There are way more people to interview and data to collect. I felt however that if I had a prototype, it would attract more people and they could bring their stories to me.

How has working with undergraduate researchers impacted your scholarship?

Number one, it gave me an awesome opportunity to connect with MIT students! It was really cool, seeing through their eyes exactly what I was doing, and opening up my mind to how to teach my work to people who were way outside of my field. I think, for me, it really helped because you don't know how much you know or how much you don’t know until you start explaining it to people, especially people who do not have any inkling about your field of expertise. I think it helped to refine a lot of my ideas.

Then I would say, as far as research, I saw myself as a kind of entrepreneur! It was very entrepreneurial in a way, so I was envisioning what it was like to be like my research subjects by starting something, leading something. I hadn't ever managed a technical project in that sense, so it was a first for me. It was very collaborative, working with the students. We were kind of riffing off each other. I felt they were farther ahead in their knowledge of technical stuff, so I was able to lean on them.

I was also able to share my research to people who would probably never have stumbled upon it, and it was really cool to see how they reacted to it. My students didn't know anything about the early histories of computing, so I thought it was so fascinating that they were finding out about what would be mostly American technology history through Africa! These are MIT students and they’re finding out about old companies like Data General, Route 128, and hard drives from my work on the Lagos PC Boom. But they're reading and cleaning up these interviews about people who are talking about things like mainframes, minis, and things that are ancient technology to like the contemporary MIT student. There was a very special moment watching them learn those things through Africa. And I felt like, well, these are the moments that I think I'm here for. When we talk about decentering—who would have thought that would be through this place that is seen as devoid of technology, that you would be now learning about these high technological things that took place here and that were being used on the continent. I felt like that was enriching for the students, and seeing that also just validated the importance of the work that I’m doing in a place like MIT.

Your fellowship here at MIT is coming to a close soon. Where will you be headed and what will you be working on next?

I’m going to be the Faculty Lead of Africa Programs at the Lauder Institute of International Studies and Management, which is an institute that is partnered between Wharton and the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania.

Primarily I'll be teaching MBA students who are also wanting to get Masters of Arts in International Studies and I will be leading the Africa initiatives for that program. I'm super excited about it. I think it's going to be a great opportunity to implement all that I've learned and to continue my work. I have an article that is forthcoming and I’m working on a book project on Building Afropreneurial Futures.

This role integrates a lot of my skill sets that I’ve honed over time—teaching, leadership, mentorship, program planning and management. I’ve had extensive experience here dealing with people outside of my field of expertise, essentially. Having this technological knowledge that I’ve acquired, and having interacted with MIT students, I understand how to speak to nonspecialists a lot better. Especially teaching, I got to interact with a lot of people who had engineering backgrounds, computer science backgrounds, and more of those pragmatic ways of thinking so I think that has been really good training for me.

I’m looking forward to seeing how that shapes up and I hope it will be a place where I can continue to grow and develop in my scholarly capabilities. Being at the DH Lab for these two years has been amazing. It’s been a very supportive community. One of the things I’ve gotten to acquire at MIT is this amazing network of people that have helped me these past two years. I hope to continue to foster that even in my new role! And I hope to continue to keep in touch and look for opportunities to bring MIT, the DH Lab and the broader institution, in conversation with what I’m doing there.