Reframing Agency and Post-Activism

My guest today is Bayo Akomolafe (Ph.D.). Bayo is rooted with the Yoruba people in a more-than-human world, is the father to Alethea and Kyah, the grateful life-partner to Ije, son and brother. A widely celebrated international speaker, posthumanist thinker, poet, teacher, public intellectual, essayist, and author of two books, These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home (North Atlantic Books) and We Will Tell our Own Story: The Lions of Africa Speak, Bayo Akomolafe is the Founder of The Emergence Network and host of the postactivist course/festival/event, ‘We Will Dance with Mountains’. 

This is a conversation about becoming. Bayo says “our culture sees growth and development as the only algorithm for creating sociality.” We discuss the gifts of disruption and the shackles of belonging. Bayo says, “we need to ‘dis-belong’ in order to become bodies…that disruption is how the world feels into itself.”

We talk about our challenges with parenting and how our children are our greatest teachers. What if we treated our children as cosmic disruptions?

We talk about racial inequality and what’s wrong with efforts to “bring marginalized people to the tables of power” because it still requires you to fit within the existing power regime, within the existing way of being. 

While we don’t discuss the metacrisis in detail in this conversation, everything we talk about is very much relevant to how we show up to do the work of addressing the metacrisis. In fact, this conversation is all about “how” we do the work which is just as important as “what” we do.

For those of us who are parents in particular working to address our greatest global challenges, I think this is a conversation you will love.

Links & Resources:

Bayo’s Website

What I Mean by Postactivism article

These Wilds Beyond Our Fences, Bayo Akomolafe

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