Across North America, February marks a month of solidarity to honour the resilience and history of the Black community. During this time, Black traditions and cultures are honoured as our on-campus community collectively promotes the diversity that makes TRU shine. One graduate student specifically has transformed her academic research into unique works of art, utilizing Black hair as a mouthpiece for resistance, history and expression of self.
Courtney Bakyayita is a graduate student in human rights and social justice at TRU whose research and advocacy have been shaped into a creative expression project titled Crowned in Resistance: The Hair That Carries Us, which features spoken poetry, performance and visual art.
ODΩ: Please tell our readers a bit about your experience as a Black student at TRU, studying human rights and social justice at the graduate level. What led to your pursuit of creative expression?
CB: Being a Black graduate student studying human rights and social justice meant that my learning was never just theoretical; it was lived, embodied, and deeply personal. I carried my own histories, my community’s stories and the experience of navigating academic spaces where Black voices and ways of knowing are often underrepresented or misunderstood. While I valued academic theory, I also began to question whose knowledge is recognized as legitimate and whose stories are excluded.
This questioning led me toward decolonizing research and education. I wanted to challenge traditional academic frameworks that prioritize distance and objectivity over lived experience, emotion and embodied knowledge. Creative expression became a way to reclaim research as something relational, cultural and human. Poetry, visual storytelling and performance allowed me to disrupt colonial ideas of what scholarship should look like and instead create work that honours storytelling as theory and art as knowledge.
I pursued creative expression because it allowed me to bring my whole self into the academy, not separating the scholar from the storyteller, or the researcher from the body that carries memory. It became both a methodological choice and an act of resistance.
ODΩ: In what way has your culture impacted your completion pathway in creative expression?
CB: My culture shaped everything, how I understand storytelling, how I understand hair, and how I understand community. Growing up within African cultural traditions where storytelling is relational and knowledge is passed through lived experience influenced my decision to pursue creative expression as my completion pathway.
Hair, for example, is not separate from identity; it carries history, lineage and social meaning. Choosing creative expression allowed me to honour ancestral ways of knowing that exist outside rigid academic frameworks. It became a way of bringing my whole self into the work, not fragmenting my cultural identity to fit academic expectations, but allowing my culture to guide the methodology itself.
ODΩ: Your exhibition features themes surrounding Black hair as not only an archive but as a living form of resistance. What are you hoping to communicate to non-Black viewers? What do you hope they will learn?
CB: That’s a really important question, because so often as Black people we are expected to create with others in mind, to soften our voices, anticipate how we might be perceived, or present ourselves in ways that feel less threatening or more easily understood. There is often pressure to accommodate, to explain and to translate. This project intentionally moves away from that. It is not created for non-Black audiences, it is created for us, for Black recognition, healing and affirmation.
For non-Black viewers, the invitation is to witness with humility. I hope they come to understand that Afrocentric ways of knowing and being are not alternative or secondary to Western frameworks; they are equally valid, rigorous and deeply rooted systems of knowledge. Black hair, in this context, becomes archive, language and living memory. The exhibition asks viewers to recognize that respect sometimes means stepping back, listening and allowing Black cultural expression to exist on its own terms without needing validation through Western lenses.
ODΩ: Given the tumultuous sociopolitical climate we live in, has this impacted your research as an artist and as an advocate for social justice?
CB: Absolutely; it has changed not only what I create, but how I create. We are living in a moment where conversations about race, identity, and justice are louder and more visible, but also more exhausting. As a Black artist and researcher, I feel that tension deeply. It pushed me to stop trying to make my work comfortable or easily digestible and instead make it honest. It also reminded me that art can hold complexity in ways traditional research sometimes cannot. My work became less about proving something and more about witnessing, documenting memory, honouring Black existence, and creating spaces where resistance and healing can coexist. In many ways, the world shaped this project, but it also gave me permission to be more fearless in how I show up as both artist and advocate.
ODΩ: In honour of Black History month, what scholars and artists have inspired your work today?
CB: My work is deeply shaped by African feminist scholars and Black feminist thinkers whose writing challenges colonial frameworks and centres African ways of knowing. Scholars like Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, who critiques Western gender systems imposed on African societies, and Amina Mama, whose work explores feminism, power, and African political realities, have influenced how I think about identity and resistance. I am also inspired by writers like Ama Ata Aidoo and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, whose storytelling honours African women’s voices and complexity.
Alongside them, thinkers such as Audre Lorde and Angela Davis continue to guide me in understanding creativity as resistance and poetry as survival. Their collective work reminds me that African feminist knowledge lives not only in academia but also in community, memory, and everyday acts of care.
I also draw inspiration from creators such as J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere, whose documentation of African hairstyles preserves cultural memory, as well as Black women artists who use hair, body, and identity as political language.