My research explores performance, ritual, embodiment, memory, and critical heritage through ethnographic and interdisciplinary approaches. This page presents a selection of publications that reflect the development of these interests and my ongoing contribution to conversations in theatre and performance studies, decolonial thought, critical heritage, and African studies.
Journal Articles
Walking Through Knowledge: Contextual Research Strategies in Ga Mashie
Journal: Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance
Year: 2026
Abstract: This paper examines Ga Mashie’s religious processions in Accra, Ghana, as vital practices of memory-making and knowledge production. Drawing on my immersive fieldwork and walking as ethnographic method, I trace how sound, smell, serendipity, and movement operate as epistemological tools. In this paper, I centre the kobolor, the Ghanaian urban wanderer attuned to everyday textures, rhythms, and propose a methodology grounded in improvisation, shifting positionalities, and collaboration. By walking with and around processions, I reveal the complex social forces that shape knowledge in Ga Mashie and reflect on the ethics of researching performance in African urban contexts.
Keywords: walking in knowledge • procession as knowledge • Ga Mashie • sensuous knowledge
Book Chapters
I Woke Up to Ŋmaaduŋmɔ: Sonic Anarchy, Silence, and Communal Healing
Book Title: Mattering Spiritualities: Performative Experiments for a Radical Imagining of the World Becoming
Publishers: Routledge
Year: 2025
Abstract: This chapter examines the performance of silence, its materiality, location, and agency in Accra. Through the annual ban on drumming and noise-making, known as Ŋmaaduŋmɔ by the Ga Mashie traditional leaders, I consider the affective relationality of silence. Various studies on the ban have focused on the tensions between Charismatic-Pentecostal and Ga religious leaders, highlighting the friction and noise that follow the ban. However, these studies often overlook the significant aspect of the ban: silence. This chapter addresses the following questions: How do Ga Kple religious practitioners alter the sound environment in the metropolis? How should we interpret the ban on drumming and noise-making beyond religious frictions? How is silence performed and observed in a “sonically enchanted” urban landscape? Rather than providing definitive answers, I outline a broad framework that contextualizes silence within an expansive epistemology. This chapter highlights the multiple points of affiliation and alienation that silence engenders in urban religiosity. It suggests that the intentionality behind the ban reflects deeper spatial, ecological, and health implications while emphasizing the spiritual ethos of the Ga tradition.
The Deities Must Hear: Embodied Rituals in Ghana’s Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic
Book Title: Communicative Perspectives on COVID-19 in Ghana at the Intersection of Culture, Science, Religion and Politics
Publishers: Routledge
Year: 2023
Abstract: The current COVID-19 viral disease outbreak in the world has forced countries to put in place several drastic measures to prevent the spread of the deadly virus. The preventive response has taken various forms globally from border closure to intense contact tracing and testing, increased community surveillance among others. This paper focuses on embodied ritual as a response to COVID-19 in Ghana. Ghana’s preventive measures have included affective, medica,l and spiritual approach. In the paper, I highlight the spiritual approach with a specific focus on traditional rituals. I comment on the ethnoreligious and epistemological significance of traditional ritual practices or otherwise ‘non-scientific’ approach in Ghana’s response to pandemic prevention. I observe that the global discourse of pandemic prevention has not paid much attention to these embodied practices. It is, therefore, significant to draw attention to these marginalized practices and open a discussion on differing practices that are observed during widespread instances of diseases and deaths in most Ghanaian communities.
Other writing
Festival Essays:
This series of essays explores the Chale Wote Street Art Festival as a site where performance, procession, public art, and critical heritage converge to generate new ways of thinking about urban space and African futures.
Gba Gba Sete Procession: Walking the Orbs into Being
Essay | Accra [Dot] Alt Radio, Chale Wote Street Art Festival, 2025.
This essay examines the Gba Gba Sete Procession at the Chale Wote Street Art Festival as a form of embodied knowledge production and liberatory public art. The essay moves beyond the idea of procession as spectacle and argues that the procession transforms Accra’s streets into a living archive where murals, performance, movement, and public participation generate new ways of imagining and rehearsing African futures. The essay draws on performance studies and sensory ethnography to explore how walking becomes a method of knowing and how artists and audiences collectively produce meaning through movement.
Read the full essay: https://accradotaltradio.com/gba-gba-sete-procession-walking-the-orbs-into-being/
The Orbs Beneath the Nile Lead to Kongo: Rehearsing Liberatory Praxis Through Street Art
Essay | Accra [Dot] Alt Radio, Chale Wote Street Art Festival, 2025.
This essay examines the fifteenth edition of the Chale Wote Street Art Festival through the theme The Orbs Beneath the Nile Lead to Kongo, arguing that the festival functions as a living archive of Pan-African memory, resistance, imagination and resistance. It brings together performance studies and urban cultural practice to explore how street art, processions, installations, and public participation transform Accra into a space where histories of colonial extraction are confronted and alternative African futures are collectively rehearsed. The essay positions the festival as a form of liberatory praxis that reclaims public space as a site of knowledge and decolonial possibility.
Read the full essay: https://accradotaltradio.com/the-orbs-beneath-the-nile-lead-to-kongo-rehearsing-liberatory-praxis-through-street-art/
Beyond Street Art Performance: A Portal for Alternative Realities and Future Possibilities
Essay | Accra [Dot] Alt Radio, Chale Wote Street Art Festival, 2024
This essay argues that performance has become one of the most transformative dimensions of the Chale Wote Street Art Festival, extending the festival beyond visual art into a multisensory space of embodied knowledge and speculative futures. The essay uses performances, processions, music, dance, and participatory interventions as a starting point to examine how artists reclaim public space to challenge dominant social narratives and activate ancestral memory. The essay positions performance as a critical medium through which the festival imagines liberatory futures and expands the possibilities of public art.
Read the full essay: https://accradotaltradio.com/beyond-street-art-performance-a-portal-for-alternative-realities-and-future-possibilities/
Afuabe Community Murals: Transforming Street Surfaces into a Living Archive of Untold Stories and Unspoken Narratives
Essay | Accra [Dot] Alt Radio, Chale Wote Street Art Festival, 2024
This essay explores the Afuabe Community Murals as an evolving form of public memory and critical heritage in Accra. Here, I observe that murals are more than static works of art. They turn street surfaces into living archives that preserve overlooked histories and recover narratives often excluded from official accounts. The essay argues that the murals transform the city into a participatory archive where memory is continually created and encountered through everyday life.
Read the full essay: https://accradotaltradio.com/afuabe-community-murals-transforming-street-surfaces-into-a-living-archive-of-untold-stories-and-unspoken-narratives/
Newspaper Articles:
Weaving Ghana at Brazil’s São Paulo Biennial.
The Mirror (Graphic Communications Group)| 2025, October 25
The article explores Theresah Ankomah’s journey to the 36th Bienal de São Paulo and the deep collaboration behind her palm-leaf installation What do you see..! It reflects on her practice of weaving as a language of care and quiet resistance and the women whose stories are interlaced in her art.
Read the full article: https://www.instagram.com/p/DQyuGTWDfrp/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==
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