So it’s Cool to be African Now or SCAN is a live-audience conversation series hosted by Mariama Wurie, on a bi-weekly basis, with African music, arts & cultural icons exploring their career journeys. SCAN intimately discusses their past and current mental health status, within the context of what it means to be an African today and the Global North contemporary mental health movement, as it spreads to the Global South. The conversations are filmed and edited for a YouTube series, as well as audio recorded for a Spotify podcast.
We are all constantly learning, be it in formal or traditional learning environments or in non-formal learning environments. One of the most powerful and influential learning tools across the globe, is news and entertainment media. This tool shapes our identity and personal learning journeys almost as much as, and sometimes even more than, formal learning. SCAN is particularly interested in saturating global media spaces with news and entertainment media that is for and by Africans, co-created within the pan-African gaze, and global gaze, rather than a euro-centric gaze that necessarily otherizes and exoticizes a normal and highly nuanced continent and its constant movements. Africa and Africans being center to conversations, and being the norm, is a rarity in the design across news and entertainment media. It is critical for SCAN, that the learning design of news and entertainment media normalizes and centers Africa and being African, as part of the global majority.
