Introducing the 'Does Your God Sleep?' project which explores young Nigerians’ relationship with fear and God through a series of discussions with various individuals over the course of two days in 2023. The seven episodes are a product of an event where an intimate space was designed for inquiry and reflection on spirituality and community. And it is the prototype for a research practice I hope to continue.

Come with an open mind.

Knowledge creates options.

(Worry less, the audio quality of the episodes to come is better than in the snippet in this episode.)

Website: immaculataabba.com

Newsletter: studiostyles.substack.com (Culture Pays)

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Hello, Immaculata here. A quick summary of what I’ve been up to so far this year: the Culture Pay Survey aimed at understanding the financial struggles of cultural workers in Nigeria; working on my vision for a public humanities library; and publishing the Restful anthology.

Culture Pay Report 2025 PDF: https://tinyurl.com/culturepayreport

Link to buy a copy of Restful: https://restful.ng/products/restful-anthology-print

A guide for printing art books in Lagos: https://tinyurl.com/printingartbooks

My printing journey: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDu375mECGY&list=PL4b3wzw3wISCFYt2t-60tn9GO7U-rHqqe

Chapters

00:00 Introduction and Personal Reflections

01:39 Cultural Work and the Culture Pay Survey

04:12 The Vision for a Public Humanities Library

07:01 Publishing Restful

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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For my final guest episode, I’m with the researcher and designer Oluwakemi Agbato who lives by the question: “How can we make good things to live with?” And explores that question through her research and design studio, Studio GB and her jewellery brand RENIKEJI. This conversation was full of passion on both sides for how history continues to live with us in the objects around us.

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04:41 James Baldwin on Suffering and Achieving One’s Own Authority

15:06 The Rich History of Nigerian Silk

19:34 The 1960 Nigeria Exhibition

22:16 “It becomes real, you’re the one pursuing knowledge, knowledge is not pursuing you.”

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Website: sweetmedicine.me

Newsletter: studiostyles.substack.com.

Instagram: @ss.studiostyles

Support Sweet Medicine: https://flutterwave.com/donate/olt4tbjytsjr

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Today’s conversation is with Mobolaji Otuyelu, the founder of two startups—a kitchenware company AGBO ILÉ and Ọjà Wellness Foods, a beverage company. As an entrepreneur focused on black innovation and social change, Mobolaji is also deeply involved with the Federation of Informal Workers’ Organisations of Nigeria (FIWON), where she collaborates on member-led initiatives to provide tangible support like health insurance, mortgage opportunities, and pension schemes for informal workers. In this conversation we discuss the ties between economic development and healing—the two need each other—, the gift of now and the power of the contemporary.

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04:02 FIWON: A Model for Informal Workers

08:48 Resourcefulness in Nigerian Entrepreneurship

16:15 Healing Through Money and Economic Capital

25:34 The Gift of Now/Culture is Dynamic

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Mentioned in the episode:

https://www.mondragon-corporation.com/en/

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Website: sweetmedicine.me

Newsletter: studiostyles.substack.com.

Instagram: @ss.studiostyles

Support Sweet Medicine: https://flutterwave.com/donate/olt4tbjytsjr

⁕

Consider joining or supporting Kwanda

From the founder of Kwanda, Jermaine Craig: "I'm focused on making the world a more generous place. I'm interested in the potential of the collective, not the individual. I want to get future philanthropists started earlier by gathering as 'Micro Philanthropists'. A blocker to generosity is a lack of transparency and trust, so I'm building Kwanda. This platform brings diasporans together to pool capital and fund local-led projects in Africa. The platform is financially transparent and allows members to decide how funds are spent."

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I've spent the past seven weeks discussing why social healing, why the humanities when people are starving, what do we do with History, what are Nigerian nervous conditions, what kind of society is Nigeria and why was Nigeria made in the first place. I set up these questions to give a sense of what the problem is, and how the centuries before now led us here.

With all this information, how can we work towards these resilient, compassionate and responsible futures? My suggestions: take ownership and pay attention to our bodies.

This episode includes an excerpt from this talk, What Kids Can't Do: Youth, Historical Agency, and Authority, by Abosede George (Associate Professor of History, Barnard College and Columbia University) at Wolf Humanities Center's 2020-21 Forum on Choice, March 17, 2021.

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03:21 Is agency all that matters? Abosede George on foregrounding other dimensions of being human

10:04 Connection comes with risk of loss and failure, connect anyway

12:47 My body’s my buddy / Body go tell you

18:24 Denying our self-sovereignty

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Website: sweetmedicine.me

Newsletter: studiostyles.substack.com.

Instagram: @ss.studiostyles

Support Sweet Medicine: https://flutterwave.com/donate/olt4tbjytsjr

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Tobiloba and I talked about transformative environmental justice in Nigeria, Lekki as prime example of land dispossession in Lagos in the name of capitalist modernism, the challenges that come up in translating and applying current popular Western frameworks of social justice in Nigeria, and why we need more Nigerians, individuals and institutions alike, to fund social research.

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01:19 Lekki, Lekki, Lekki

07:29 Wetin concern me concern government property?

11:56 ‘We were only four in my Landscape Architecture class.’

20:54 Landscape for the people by the people

29:49 Elsewheres: Transformative environmental justice practices in Nigeria

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Mentioned:

Dispossess: Evictions for ‘Development' (Immaculata for Heinrich Böll Foundation, 2021)

Lagos Urban Development Initiative (LUDI)

hFactor

Fabulous Urban

Folu Oyefeso

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Website: sweetmedicine.me

Newsletter: studiostyles.substack.com.

Instagram: @ss.studiostyles

Support Sweet Medicine: https://flutterwave.com/donate/olt4tbjytsjr

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, I speak with Gbope Onigbanjo, a researcher and consultant working in the fields of international affairs, peace studies, and political economy with a geographical focus on Africa. Our conversation centred around Nigeria’s role as Big Brother in West Africa and how that has bred skepticism among other states in the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). This is a unique episode in this project in that it zooms out a bit from the individual and communities of individuals to look at Nigeria’s relationship with its mates: other countries in West Africa.

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01:32 Exploring Liberal Peace-Keeping

03:50 ‘Healing’ as Peace and Security

05:59 Understanding Peace in African Contexts

12:25 ECOWAS and Nigeria

23:18 Elite-based/State Peace vs Local Peace

27:30 Russian flag in Kano?

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Website: sweetmedicine.me

Newsletter: studiostyles.substack.com.

Instagram: @ss.studiostyles

Support Sweet Medicine: https://flutterwave.com/donate/olt4tbjytsjr

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.