The interview was conducted by undergraduate research assistant Fyza Azam.
Fyza Azam: Could you tell me what you currently do or study?
Ejiofor Nwogwu: I am a PhD student in the English and Cultural Studies department at McMaster University. I am currently in my second year, preparing for my comprehensive examination. My doctoral research examines the challenges confronting university education in Nigeria through the lens of critical pedagogy. Besides my research, I have worked as a research assistant and am currently a teaching assistant.
Fyza Azam: What is/what was your role as a research assistant in the Racialized Ecologies Project?
Ejiofor Nwogwu: From May to August 2025, I was a research assistant on a Racialized Ecologies project with Dr. Susie O’Brien. The project focused on settler realism and the concept of abundance. Settler realism encompasses concepts such as settler futurity, capitalist realism, petro-culture, and related fields.
My role in the project was to identify and gather a range of resources, including scholarly resources, popular cultural texts, and other traditional cultural texts that address different aspects of the project. I was responsible for gathering these resources, reviewing them closely, and producing notes that highlighted their relevance to the project’s various sub-themes. I also compiled bibliographies to support Dr. O’Brien’s work and to make the research process more efficient. As a Black person living in Canada, I feel that the project resonates with both my personal experiences and my broader research interests.
Fyza Azam: Are there any specific skills that you learned working as an RA that have been useful in your own studies or in your professional work?
Ejiofor Nwogwu: Definitely! I have not only learned new skills but also honed existing ones. As you know, each research assistantship role or project comes with different requirements and may require either different skills or different ways of applying existing skills. In the projects I have assisted with, I have learned how to use the internet to conduct different kinds of research, identify what is needed for a project, and hone my communication skills.
I have also developed fact-checking skills, including the ability to assess whether a source is useful and to verify information when its credibility is uncertain. Apart from that, I have learned and applied strong organizational and time-management skills across all the projects I have worked on. I have also learned and applied good documentation skills. Different projects require different kinds of documentation, such as preparing citations and bibliographies and formatting documents or manuscripts. These skills and more are what I have learned and honed through my research assistantship.
Fyza Azam: Do/did your own studies intersect with the topic of racialized ecologies? If so, in what ways?
Ejiofor Nwogwu: My doctoral project does not directly intersect, but my broader research interests do. For instance, I am interested in popular culture, and I plan to work on a paper on environmental politics in Nigerian popular music, focusing on Burna Boy’s song and short documentary titled “Whiskey”. Although the focus is on Nigeria, I intend to draw on environmental humanities scholarship from basically anywhere in the world. Therefore, I think that my research interests, broadly speaking, intersect with some of the subthemes of racialized ecologies.
Fyza Azam: As you have been conducting your own research, have you run into any challenges? If so, how have you overcome those challenges?
Ejiofor Nwogwu: Thank you for that question, Fyza. Yes, I have encountered challenges. One common challenge has been time, since these roles have not been my only commitments. Alongside them, I have had my own research, coursework, and other responsibilities, so it has not always been easy to find enough time to attend to them all. One way I’ve overcome this challenge is by managing my time well, knowing what to prioritize at each point in time, and what to sacrifice, if need be. For instance, if I set my priorities well, I will know what to focus on this week or this day, so I don’t get to a point where I am unable to deliver on any of the projects. So, although time has been a challenge, it hasn’t stopped me from meeting the required deadlines on any of the projects I have been part of.
Another challenge is that it is not often easy to find the sources you want for projects because, although the research ideas are there, you need specific sources with theories that would align with your ideas or support your arguments. It’s not easy to find those, but that’s where my experience and skills as a researcher come in. What I have always done is break my ideas down and then search for the relevant sources one by one, especially using the internet. I have also used offline research. For instance, word-of-mouth recommendations have been very helpful to me in all the research I have been involved in, including my own research. I think that despite all the challenges I have had, I’ve found a way to navigate them.
Fyza Azam: Is there anything else you would like to say about the experience of being a research assistant?
Ejiofor Nwogwu: For me, working as a research assistant is not just an opportunity to work; it’s also an opportunity to learn. I gain new knowledge, learn a new set of skills, and find new ways to apply the skills I already have. That’s why being a research assistant is always an opportunity to contribute to a project but also to learn, and whatever I learn in a project would also help me in my own research. Hence, it is something that I always look forward to because of the different possibilities that I find in it.
Fyza Azam: That was the final question. Thank you for your time.