Show notes
In this episode, I interview Dr. Bayo Akomolafe, a writer, speaker, and “walkout” academic who left the field of Clinical Psychology to pursue a “small, intense life”. He is Chief Curator and Executive Director of The Emergence Network —an earth-wide commonwealth of trickster-activist-artists inspired to rethink our patterns of responding to crises.
Here, we discuss:
- His decision to turn down a major academic promotion to prioritize authentic work and family life
- His collaborative action-research project that is rethinking activism with Africa at the center
- How he’s crafting critical, theoretical work for wider audiences in the form of story
Key quotations from Bayo:
- “Because the world is alive, we will not finally apprehend it”
- “Knowledge has been done in by its noble separation from the rest of the world”
- “Knowledge is no longer living outside of our premises…the world creates knowledge, instigates, disturbs”
- “The transversality of our times calls for us to reshape the way we approach learning”
Key themes:
- Lives as intergenerational practices
- The process of his faith ‘leaving’ him shifting his focus from final truth to story
- Movement away from the idea that the world is merely constituted by language or ‘story’
- Study of clinical psychology as an opportunity to understand the universe of the human being thoroughly
- The ways in which activism is being disturbed by the anthropocene
- His notion of ‘postactivism’
- Vunja—a project of the Emergence Network focused on rupturing the continuum of progress and inviting dance at the same time
- The limitations of inclusion as a prevailing concern of activism
- How he sought to “reclaim knowl edge from the clutches of Eurocentric Enlightenment” in his book, These Wilds Beyond Our Fences
- How he sought to transcend “academese by discussing entanglement through [his] journeys with [his] daughter”
- Transparenting and microchimerism frameworks for refiguring what it means to parent
- Unschooling as listening to our children and as emancipatory, decolonial work
- Transfabulation— art creates reality and reality creates art—in his forthcoming book
Resources:
- Bayo Akomolafe, These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home
- Margaret Baumann, Ajapa the Tortoise: A Book of Nigerian Folk Tales
- Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning
- Wendell Berry, Standing by Words: Essay
- Childish Gambino— “This is America” video
- Alexander Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human
