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For The Wild

Dr. BAYO AKOMOLAFE on Slowing Down in Urgent Times [ENCORE] /285

For The Wild

For The Wild

Philosophy, Society & Culture, For The Wild, Anthropocene, Story Telling, Religion & Spirituality, Decolonization, Progressive, Liberation, Land, Media

4.81.2K Ratings

🗓️ 4 May 2022

⏱️ 88 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This week we are rebroadcasting our interview with Dr. Bayo Akomolafe, originally aired in January of 2020. Our hearts and minds are set to work by the urgent eco-social crises of this time. Caught in a cultural twitch of frenetic production and the sticky paradigms of modernity, we’ve penned vocabulary and designed technologies, manufactured frameworks and crunched numbers in an effort to diagnose and “treat” planetary collapse. We are invited by this week’s guest, Dr. Bayo Akomolafe, to pause and abandon solutionism, step back from the project of progress, and dance into a different set of questions: What does the Anthropocene teach us as a destabilizing agent that resists our taming? How can we show up in our movements of justice if “the ways we respond to crisis is part of the crisis”? What happens when we unfurl into a space of slowness and relinquish human mastery to a wider cosmic net of relations? Bayo Akomolafe (Ph.D.) considers his most sacred work to be learning how to be with his daughter and son, Alethea Aanya and Kyah Jayden—and their mother, his wife and "life-nectar,” Ijeoma. An author, speaker, renegade academic, and proud father, Bayo is Chief Curator and Director of The Emergence Network, a constellation of humans and nonhumans working together trans-locally to curate projects, rituals, conversations and events that nurture senses of the otherwise via practices that trouble the traditional boundaries of agency and possibility. Bayo is also a visiting professor at Middlebury College, Vermont, and has taught in universities around the world. He is a consultant with UNESCO, leading efforts for the Imagining Africa’s Future (IAF) project. Bayo has authored two books, We Will Tell Our Own Story! and These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home, and has penned forewords for many others.Music by Daniel HiggsVisit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.Support the show

Transcript

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0:00.0

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0:32.0

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0:37.2

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0:42.4

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0:48.8

Welcome to For the Wild Podcast. I'm Ayanne Young.

0:52.9

Today, we are speaking with author, speaker, renegade academic, and proud father,

0:59.2

bio-a-como-law-fi.

1:14.4

In trying to climb out of the pits that we've dug for ourselves,

1:19.1

the pit becomes resilient. In trying to escape the prison, the prison gains its form.

1:25.5

So in a very critical sense, we are in a crisis of form.

1:30.4

And this form is the indeterminacy of things.

1:34.5

The background has crashed into the figure, into the foreground,

1:38.6

and so sense-making is at a crisis point now.

1:42.1

We need trickster approaches.

1:44.7

We need ways of dancing away, or dancing to fugitive spaces.

1:50.6

Dancing to sanctuaries where we can ship shift, and I think leaving morning,

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