May 17, 2016 – Speaking at the Nubuke Art Gallery in East Legon, Accra, Kobina Ankomah-Grahamh, lecturer at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences shared perspectives on how information and various facets of academia can be disseminated beyond academic environments to people across the nation.
Under the theme Televised Revolution: How pop Academia Can Save Ghana, Ankomah-Grahamh engaged the audience on ways access to information can be made possible to demographics across the country, regardless of socio-economic class, gender or educational level.
“These are things that everyone should know,” he said. “Things about our history and present, as an African people, that should not be in one optional class at Ashesi for some students. It’s the type of thing that everybody in this country, and on the continent, should know.”
For Ankomah-Grahamh, an effective channel through which information can be shared is Pop Academia. Through this medium or space, information can be spread beyond classrooms and lecture halls, through people and systems that may not necessarily represent academia.
“In order to take our knowledge out of ivory tower systems and share them with everybody, we need pop academics,” he said. “The type of academics who don’t just sit in university, but the type you see on your television screens and hear on your radios and on social media. We need to make knowledge attractive and relevant. Essentially, we need people and mediums that are not necessarily academic, to take ideas and knowledge and share them to our productive benefit.”
The talk formed part of Nubuke’s Foundation’s Ghana Must Go initiative to drive conversations around advancing Ghana through the arts. “Ten years ago, we had a strong sense of purpose about what we needed to do to generate conversation around the arts and culture of Ghana,” said Odile Tevie, member of the Board of Directors of Nubuke Foundation. “We need to galvanise people into action. Ghana must go gives you that focus that we have something to do, that is why we thought it was important. We’ve done a lot of talking, and we need to find creative people who will move the conversation from talk to action.”