Akoroko's Tambay Obenson to Deliver Virtual Public Keynote at University of Toronto's Black Studies Summer Seminar
Akoroko founder and editor Tambay Obenson will deliver a virtual public keynote at the fifth edition of the Black Studies Summer Seminar (<BLK-S3tudies>), hosted by the University of Toronto Scarborough, on Thursday, May 28, 2026, from 3:15 PM to 4:45 PM EST.
The talk, titled "Reporting, Researching, and Tool-Building Across African Film, TV, and Digital Media Ecosystems," is free and open to the public and will be streamed live to a global audience. Registration details and the livestream link are available at
blk-s3tudies.com/events.
The session draws from over a decade of editorial and research work across the African and African diaspora screen sectors — from Shadow and Act to Akoroko, to
@africafilmpress, the cross-regional alliance Akoroko co-founded with
@sinemafocuske in Kenya and
@WKM_Up in Nigeria.
The Black Studies Summer Seminar is a five-day research-intensive program for PhD candidates, postdoctoral fellows, pre-tenure faculty, librarians, archivists, researchers, and artists working in and around the field of Black Studies in Canada and beyond.
Its 2026 theme — "The next place we go, they will follow": Beyond Digital Capture — asks how technologies of surveillance, data extraction, and algorithmic reproduction attempt to enclose Black life, and how scholars, artists, and practitioners are responding.
This year's program features keynotes and workshops from Kameelah Janan Rasheed (Yale School of Art, CalArts), Stanley H. Griffin (University of the West Indies, Mona), Lauren McLeod Cramer (University of Toronto), and the Wilding AI collective, alongside a 14-member cohort drawn from institutions across Canada and the United States.
The full schedule and presenter bios are available on the seminar's website:
blk-s3tudies.com
#BlackStudies #DigitalCapture #AfricanCinema #Akoroko