Oghenevwarho Gabriel Ojakovo

I joined the California State University, Dominguez Hills, as an Assistant Professor of Music and the Center for African Diaspora Sacred Music and Musicians Director in Spring 2024. Previously, I worked as a Teaching/Research Assistant at the Department of Music, Women’s and Gender Studies, the Faculty of Nursing at the University of Alberta, and as an Assistant lecturer at Kwara State University, Malete, Nigeria.

Research
Oghenevwarho’s research interest centers on the intersection of music making in Africa and the diaspora performance space and its contribution to negotiating and renegotiating the complexities that affect the lived experiences of Africans in the diaspora.

“In the Battle for Hearts and Minds: Music in the Construction and Deconstruction of Boko Haram’s Ideologies in Northern Nigeria.”
My fieldwork in Nigeria focuses primarily on the place and significance of the Islamic hymnody used by the Boko Haram Islamic movement as propaganda to promote its ideologies of radical Islam in northeastern Nigeria. I also explore the use of songs as a medium for deconstructing the radical ideologies that Boko Haram promotes, especially music created by musicians whom Boko Haram violently targets.

“Religious Songs, Spirituality, and the Formation of African Immigrant Identities in the Diaspora.”
This current project is a study of religious songs in the formation of African/African Caribbean immigrant spirituality that connects their faith to the “cultural cohort,” thus intersecting between their constructions of “old” and “new” homes as they create a new religious identity in the Diaspora.

Teaching Interests
Oghenevwarho’s teaching covers African music in the diaspora, Black music and the politics of identity; music and African religion (Christianity and Islam); Black music and social movements; global popular music; and the introduction to ethnomusicology.