Kuukuwa Manful

Kuukuwa Manful is a researcher and trained architect who creates, studies, and documents architecture in Africa. While at CASBS as a visiting scholar, she will be writing up research on what she terms the unformalisation of indigenous architectures and construction technologies in West Africa. This work is based on a collection of over 30,000 endangered archival documents from early- and mid-twentieth century Ghana that she digitised with a grant from the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme. She will analyse the colonial and postcolonial development of urban governance, building regulation, and the architecture profession to show how authorities used formalisation and regulation processes to diminish and exclude indigenous builders and built forms. She will also explore the contemporary legacies of these in African cities. From September 2022, she will be a postdoctoral researcher on the African State Architecture project. She holds Masters and BSc Architecture degrees from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology and an MSc African Studies from The University of Oxford. Her PhD from SOAS, University of London is an examination of nation-building, social class, and modernities through an analysis of the sociopolitical and physical architectures of secondary schools in Ghana. You can learn more about her at www.kuukuwa.com and follow her on Twitter: @Kuukuwa_