Our Founder/CEO, Dr Maxwell A. Ayamba was honoured to present his research paper at the British Sociological Association Annual Conference 2026 which took place 8th to Friday 10th April 2026 at the University of Manchester.
The theme of the 2026 conference was ‘75 Years of Sociology’ attended by researchers, academics from all over the world and 11 renowned publishers including SAGE Publishers, Routledge & Taylor Francis Group, Policy Press and Palgrave Macmillan.
Over the past seven and a half decades, the BSA has played a central role in advancing scholarship, fostering collaboration and supporting the development of the sociological field. It is organised in streams designed to represent the major areas of research with which sociologists are engaged.
These streams are open to any topic on which academics and researchers are currently working on, enabling delegates to meet with others who share their interests and explore a variety of subjects.
The conference offered me the opportunity to present my paper, titled, “Walking While Black in the English Countryside”,drawing heavily on my PhD research which uses walking ethnography and works from Spivak’s (1985) positionality on subaltern voices as lens to understand how hierarchy of power and landscape impact on the ontology of Blackness in the English landscape.
Sociologists have continued to debate existing knowledge hierarchies, using methodological approaches to help address societal problems and to bring about positive and constructive change.
This conference presented the opportunity to share findings of my PhD research on the critical need to reconsider the erasure of histories of people of Black African ancestry’s descent from English landscape history where National Parks are sited.
I proposed the need to reimagine the decoloniality of the English landscape constructed and historized as a ‘white space’. And instead, examine commonalities and solidaritiesby engaging in constructive debates on epistemic justice and decolonisation, by researching genuine sociological knowledge about the history, presence and contributions by Black people in English landscape history.