On 6 August 2020, Director for the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship Professor James Ogude participated in STREAMS, an international conference for the Environmental Humanities. Professor Ogude participated in a conversation on "Ubuntu and the Principle of Co-Agency in African Ecology" with Isabel Perez.

The conference took place from 5 to 7 August 2020, and was hosted virtually from Stockholm. The purpose of the conference is to provide a platform for Environmental Humanities scholars can come congregate to share their work, advance ideas and craft new imanginaries that can shape present and future transformations. The field of Environmental Humanities is broad and experimental, and includes academics, practitioners, activists, artists, policy makers and scientists and more who want to address the challenges and solutions in the face of ongoing ecological disaster. 

Professor Ogude's conversation theme is outlined below:  

Parting from the Bantu concept of ubuntu, which Prof. James Ogude has researched extensively, this conversation will explore the relevance of this ethical and philosophical concept in the current times of global pandemics and environmental crises. Ubuntu implies co-agency and relationality – notions that, according to this philosophy, go well beyond a purely anthropocentric perspective. Prof. Ogude will offer insights into how this concept can be used in postcolonial ecocriticism theories, and how it can serve as the lens to look at the current politics of extractivism and climate (in)justice issues, in this epoch controversially labeled as the Anthropocene

You can watch the conversation on Youtube or on the STREAMS website.