Yesterday, after an official conferment of the doctorate this past February, Carleton University decorated me alongside others with the velvet cap and the robe for a PhD in Anthropology at a convocation ceremony that ended eight years of confinement, dedication, and unflinching expectations.
AFTER receiving two master degrees from the University of Lagos — 2003 and 2015 respectively –I re-immersed myself into the academics beginning 2017, obtaining an M.A in Film studies at Carleton University, Ottawa. Re-absorbing myself in this way — after nearly 2 decades of photojournalistic practice — was not for lack of knowledge of the process of film production, particularly the documentary genre. Rather, it was for a certification that points to the theoretical issues that underpin the process itself.
I graduated from Carleton film school after a year and half, but the undying desire for ethnographic film practice at the intersection of its theoretical memes with culture reignited an age-long thirst for the highest academic degree.
Yesterday, after an official conferment of the doctorate this past February, Carleton University decorated me alongside others with the velvet cap and the robe for a PhD in Anthropology at a convocation ceremony that ended eight years of confinement, dedication, and unflinching expectations.
I am grateful to my supervisors — Professor Rutherford Blair and Bernhard Leistle and my committee members, Professor Nduka Otiono and Professor Aboubakar Sonogo as well as Professor Monica Patterson whose courses in curatorial and material analytic practices I audited for a concurrent diploma. Thank you all!
While my PhD research, “Pentecostal Christianity and Yoruba Oracular Practices: Religious Differences and Ambivalences in the Utilization of the Media in Lagos and Its Environs”, is dedicated to Professor Pius Adesanmi (1972-2019), I am grateful for the support I received from people I encountered in Otta town and Ile-Ife at Mount Zion Films. Such support has only reminded me of the street stories I have always told with the black box and the reason I’ll continue to ask hard questions about the human condition through the light it unleashes.
As I walked across the stage at Carleton, moving in the directions of potential classrooms, boardrooms, and newsrooms across the world, I could only whisper these words to myself:
“Dr. Akintunde, it is now time to return to the field…to explore new frontiers”