From 25 November until 6 December 2015 Dr. Ayobami Ojebode from the University of Ibadan in Nigeria visited the Connecting in Times of Duress project. Purpose of his visit was to work with the team on the aspect of communication, a key concept within our work. Dr. Ayobami Ojebode is a senior lecturer and Head of Department of Communication and Language Arts and promised to provide insights into our work from the field of media and communication studies, of which he is an expert.

A masterclass was organized on the 27^th of November, in which Dr. Ojebode discussed causality and correlation in communication studies during the morning session. The afternoon session existed of an in-depth discussion about information biographies, as proposed by Prof. Mirjam de Bruijn, and the papers of participating MA and PhD students. The masterclass was meant to give students new feedback especially but not solely concerning the concept of communication, with which they could strengthen their own work. Also, a collaboration on a methodological paper on information biographies between Prof. de Bruijn and Dr. Ojebode was born out of this masterclass.

A week later, on the 3^rd of December, the CTD team organized a public seminar by Dr. Ojebode entitled ‘Perpetual Migrants: Social media and African Youth’s Search for Utopia. In this seminar, Dr. Ojebode spoke about the role of (negative) images of migration to Europe that are being spread through social media on migration intentions of Nigerian youth. The seminar and the lively discussion afterwards were a success and have equally helped the speaker to continue the work he started on this important topic. One of our guests, Frank van Kesteren, provided a news item reviewing Dr. Ojebode’s lecture. The piece can be found under the title “African youth migration: the role of images of failure” at the INCLUDE knowledge platform.

During his visit, Dr. Ojebode has also had valuable conversations with the different PhD students within the team on their respective work. These discussions were fruitful and helped the individual projects and the team as a whole develop further. In this week, the foundation was laid for long-term collaboration between Connecting in Times of Duress and the communication department of the University of Ibadan.