Dr Alimi’s research at the LACC focuses on urban social space and how cemetery practices, testimonies at cemeteries as well as internal order of burial spaces can help understand social relations in Lagos. His project seeks to interrogate questions of how and why in death, cemeteries correspond to, and represent extension or continuation of real-life experience of social relations and boundaries. His work also seeks to examine how the process of enshrining the identity of the deceased as individuals in the cemeteries echo social hierarchies, power relations, economic status and boundaries of other spaces.He has also been looking at how cemetery practices as manifested in the materials, forms and size of tombs mirror cultural continuum and social changes within the urbanscapes.

Since his arrival in February, Dr Alimi has visited different public and private cemeteries in Lagos to collect data. He has visited the National Archives Ibadan to collect relevant archival documents that speak on the politics of cemetery in Lagos. His field experience has inspired additional on-going studies on “The history of Thing” and “Animals as Historical Actors.”