On Saturday, April 29th, at 2:30PM EDT, the Schumacher Center for a New Economics hosted Bayo Akomolafe for “Why We Need Postactivism Today,” a talk about racial justice, freedom, the future, and the promise of a different kind of politics altogether. The talk took place in the Sanctuary at Saint James Place in Great Barrington, MA, followed by a Q&A.
Bayo Akomolafe is a philosopher, writer, activist, professor of psychology, and executive director of The Emergence Network. The convener of the concepts of ‘postactivism’, ‘transraciality’ and ‘ontofugitivity’, Dr. Bayo Akomolafe is an international speaker, 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.
As founder and elder of The Emergence Network and chief host of the widely popular online-offline course/festival series, We Will Dance with Mountains, Bayo curates an earth-wide project for the re-calibration of our ability to respond to civilizational crisis – a project framed within a material feminist/posthumanist/postactivist ethos and inspired by Yoruba indigenous cosmologies. He considers this a shared art – exploring the edges of the intelligible, dancing with posthumanist ideas, dabbling in the mysteries of quantum mechanics and the liberating sermon of an ecofeminism text, and talking with others about how to host a festival of radical silence on a street in London – and part of his inner struggle to regain a sense of rootedness to his community.
Bayo Akomolafe is a recipient of the 2021 New Thought Walden Award, meant to honor those who use empowering spiritual ideas and philosophies to change lives and make our planet a better place.
