My research interests cross the fields of race/ethnicity and gender in both U.S and Europe, urban cities, and space and place. In my book, I examine the role that cityspaces play in forming multifaceted identities, making home, and building relationships for first- and second-generation Nigerian immigrants. Exploring spatial trajectories in two different types of cityspaces—one American, one Irish—provides rich new insights into African immigration, identity, race, and class in the twenty-first century. By integrating these trajectories with the lived experiences of individual immigrants and their families, we are able to vividly reveal intriguing new patterns of settlement, identity, and urban lifestyle that have appeared in recent years, which are uniquely modeled by the Nigerian immigrant communities featured in this study. As I show, Nigerians’ use of the cityspace to create home and establish meaningful social and home places outside of traditional ethnic enclaves reveals an as-yet unexamined—yet vital—cultural engagement with urban adaptation.

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My study shows how immigrants and the second generation incorporate by their use of place and with reference to urban identity; and why, as race continues to be an obstacle for immigrants of color, place becomes increasingly important. The key findings of this research examine how much space Nigerians use in cities—the geographical reach of their key life activities—and how that urban utilization contributes to growing identities, independent of national or ethnic identities, and to transforming space and place into home. To fully capture the importance of urban areas to immigrants in the African Diaspora as they struggle to make home in a new place, and to provide theoretical context for the empirical data presented, I ground these observations and insights in three prominent urban social constructs—hooks’s “site of resistance,” Lefebvre’s urban citizenship, and Soja’s theory of cityspaces. The empirical data, presented in combination with these theoretical foundations, allows us to better understand how cities, in correlation with race, ethnicity, and class, influence incorporation and identity formation in the West.

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The second strand of my research agenda explores Black Americans living in Europe. In the 20th century prominent black Americans found themselves moving to Europe to escape harsh systematic and everyday racism in the United States. Famous entertainers, scholars, and writers such as Josephine Baker, W.E.B. Du Bois, and James Baldwin, extensively traveled to or completely moved to Europe. Moreover, after World War I, black soldiers wanted to settle in different areas in Europe where they were stationed; particularly in France. Black Americans found different countries in Europe offered a freedom from racial discrimination that they had faced in the United States. In this research, I explore if Black Americans living in Europe in the 21st century find the same freedom their predecessors enjoyed. While there has been an abundance of racial comparison scholarship between Europe and the United States, very few examine people of color who had lived in both places. I explore the experiences of Black Americans who grew up in America but live in Europe and discuss race and racism in both places. 

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Finally, my work examines the importance of teaching Critical Race Theory in the classroom. My most recent article published in Teaching Sociology shows the benefits of using comic books for teaching race and ethnicity. I also discuss the reluctance students express while approaching subjects such as race and show how active learning exercises can be beneficial for students in college courses. In addition, alongside, Kelsy Kretschmer and Christopher Stout (sibling), we created a variation of a teaching simulation that was presented in U.S college courses to show how race and inequalities affected minority groups in the U.S. Using both quantitative and qualitative methods, our study shows how the students found the game positively affected their understanding about racialization and systematic racism in the United States. The results were published in Teaching Political Science.

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