
Dr Opemiposi Adegbulu
RACE.ED Stuart Hall Foundation Fellow, January - December 2024
I am a corporate law scholar who is interested in fashion, public interest and decoloniality. I was a co-founder of a West African inspired jewellery brand (Omolola Jewellery) for over 6 years whilst researching in corporate law, corporate governance, gender and coloniality. I am passionate about celebrating and highlight knowledge created by Black people in its many forms.
Project title: The redress: decolonising the notion of the public interest
My project will be a crosscutting exploration of the coloniality underlying the notion of the public interest. The concept of the public interest used in dominant academic and political discourse reinforces various dehumanising structures that infuse the historical and “geopolitical conditions through which diverse bodies and experiences are socially and politically produced. Critically looking at public interest indicates that even ideas thought to be benign like the public interest, must be decolonised before they can serve as a tool for tempering or combatting corporate (over)power in our global societies. My research will argue for the decolonisation of the public interest, that is, the delinking of peoples’ interests from universal (hegemonic modern Western) abstracts which rather than include all, excludes and erases many, implicitly privileging a dominant, ‘objective’ norm to the detriment of others. This research will explore the notion of alternative modernities to investigate possible reconstitutions of the public interest.