After completing a PhD thesis on ‘Religious Change and the Reconstruction of Idoani (a Yoruba Community)’ in 1986, Abiola spent 4 years working in health education and community development for the Foundation For Women’s Health and Development Research (FORWARD) and Lambeth Women and Children’s Health Project. She then worked as a freelance research development and training consultant to a wide variety of voluntary organisations, local authorities, health authorities and colleges as well as in qualitative market research. She has also served on the management committee for several voluntary organisations.

Abiola’s started teaching at UEL in 1996 on the Communication Studies Course in, what was then, the Faculty of Social Sciences in the Department of Education and Community Studies.

She moved with the rest of Communication Studies into the Department of Cultural and Innovation Studies at the new Docklands Campus in 1999 continuing to teach in the Department of Education and Community Studies for the Early Childhood Studies Programme on a part time basis.

In 2004 she moved into the Cass School of Education on a full time basis.

• Teaching
• Admission and Induction of new students
• PhD supervision
• Fieldtrip to Ghana
• Developing MA in Community Leadership and Management

• The African Diaspora in the UK
• African Childhoods
• Children and Women’s Rights
• Community development research
• Interpersonal and Mass Communication in Education
• Identity, Difference and ‘Race’
• Teaching and Learning with Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs).

• Education and Community Development
• Youth and Community
• Early Childhood
• Citizenship

• ED 1010 Sociology of Childhood
• ED 1011 Children and Languages
• ED 2014 Children and Communication
• ED 3022 Gender Security and Education For All

1. Researching attitudes to children’s rights in Nigeria
2. Defining gender security
3. African childhoods
4. Examining the theory which underpins the practice of Healing Racism

1. ‘Linking the Academy with the Community in the UK and Africa’ - presented to the Centre for Gender Security Studies and Advancement, Pre-conference Round Table, University of Abuja, Nigeria, March 2005
2. ‘Reflections on child rearing practices in Black families’ - presented to the Divided Loyalties Conference at the Institute of Education, London, March 2004
3. ‘Intergenerational Storytelling in African Families’ - presented to Centre for Narrative Research, University of East London, Seminar Programme, October 2003
4. ‘Racism, Ethnicity & the Curriculum: The Politics of Critical Pedagogy’ - panel presentation with Sanjay Sharma for National Conference on Institutional Racism in Higher Education at the University of Leeds Centre for Ethnicity & Racism Studies, July 2002
5. ‘African Children and the challenges of migration’ - paper presented to Africans Unite Against Child Abuse (AFRUCA) Conference, January 2002
6. ‘The challenges of developing ‘contextually appropriate’ resources for early years education in Nigeria’ presented to the 10th European Conference of the European Early Childhood Education Research Association (EECERA) on Quality in Early Childhood Education, August 2000
7. ‘The Hidden Cost of Immigration - Broken attachments and childhood losses’ presented to the ‘Attachment Loss and Reunion’ Joint Conference of the Separation and Reunion Forum and Goldsmiths College, June 2000

1. Board Member Africa Foundation for Development (AFFORD)- http://www.afford-uk.org
2. Chair of AFFORD’s Research Committee