“Fall(ing) Apart? Inclusion as Intervention into the Nigerian Experience” was an Interdisciplinary Conference hosted in the city of Ibadan, Nigeria, from the 8th to the 10th of December 2021. It was a follow-up project building on the 2020 theme “Insecurities and Socila Cohesion in Nigeria: Living in and through a Risk Society” The project was conceived within the framework of the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdientst – German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) Alumni event. The Conference keynote was titled “Our Ceiling is Not Made of Glass: Breaking Through Barriers to Women’s Inclusion in Political Leadership in Nigeria” by Prof.Remi Sonaiya.
As 2021 was winding down, the social conditions defining the lived experience in and of Nigeria(ns) as a risk society did not subside. Rather, there were new dimensions to the Nigerian realities. Thus, the conference provided a space for a critical assessment of socio-political events in Nigeria and as a follow-up to the 2020 conference. We mapped socio-economic and political events like the October 2020 #Endsars protest, insecurities manifesting through incessant killings and widespread kidnappings and underperforming economic indices vis a vis a new wave of middle-class migration (JAPA).

During the Conference, we looked around and within…
Part of the objective of the 2021 conference was to take the route which conceived the lived conditions in Nigeria as not merely the case of an external aggressor or the colonial experience. Partly, we concluded that what results from today from what Nganang (2017) refers to as cowardice acts the vilest and the most inhuman conditions a government and an elite class can perpetuate on the citizens.
On our part, we envisaged the Conference as a platform that formalizes and prioritizes voices from the margins, creating alternative and counter-discourses towards building a sustainable and preferable Nigerian and African society. We work with the idea of enabling the emergence of critical working groups ideologically towards multiplex solutions to a social problem. As a guiding principle, we do not often conceive of the conference as an isolated academic practice. In fact, we are deliberate in steering our frameworks and activities towards critical interventions both at the levels of knowledge production, reimagining solutions, and stakeholders’ engagements.  We take self-reflexivity seriously as a method of scholarship practice allowing us towards collaborative knowledge production and practice as solutions of Nigeria and Africa’s future.
We are deliberate in allowing a constellation where the conference space welcomes contributions of all forms (academia and professionals; lettered and unlettered; women and youths) to come together and engage concretely with thematic objectives. We emphasized ways of knowing and doing indigenous knowledge production through collaborative efforts and embracing methods that de-emphasize alienation of the critical mass that comprises non-western or formally educated citizens, women, and youths. For us, it is about platforms and spaces for the emergence of once alienated critical voices, especially the women, youths and non-western or formally educated towards sustainable solutions.
Oladapo O. Ajayi (Convener)