For The Wild presents

SLOW STUDY: We Will Dance With Mountains: Into the Cracks! with Bayo Akomolafe

Dr. Bayo Akomolafe and a vast network of co-conspirators, fugitives, dancers, thinkers, children, elders, and creatives have brought forth We Will Dance With Mountains: Into The Cracks!, the fifth iteration of a series of courses hosted by Bayo.

For The Wild is elated in sharing a digestible version of 2021’s gathering of 1000+ people. The audio portion of the Slow Study is a series of lectures and practice prompts from We Will Dance with Mountains: Into the Cracks!– edited into a learning journey for you to explore from your home. We Will Dance with Mountains is a carnivalesque course in postactivism (a formulation of Báyò), a matter of fissures, fault lines, cracks, openings, seismic shifts, endings, and fugitive marronage.

The course (often described as an expedition or a wild adventure by previous participants) is about recuperating our connections with a ‘world’ that can no longer be seen as dormant, mute and passive. It is about coming to new senses, and co-generating new practices of place-making in partnership with the more-than-human world.

Upon purchase you will receive a download link in your email inbox with the full coursework compressed in a zip folder. The links expires after 24 hours from purchase, so be sure to download within this timeframe. Once downloaded, you will have unlimited access to the curriculum which includes:

• One (1) 80-page We Will Dance With Mountains Digital Course Book with emergent curriculum, articles and artwork in PDF format
• Seven (7) Audio files in MP3 format with over five hours of explorative and provocative listening content
• Seven (7) Transcripts of the audio files in PDF format

“Do not pray exclusively to the ancestors of the land; make room also for the spirits of the fault line, the new gods that scream through cracks with musical notes of worlds to come.”

— Dr. Bayo Akomolafe, We Will Dance With Mountains: Into the Cracks!

Cost

We offer two sliding scales based on your relative financial standing. The range between the two scales is meant to reflect not only the incredible disparity in economic conditions between different parts of the world but also the historical reality of stolen wealth in many different forms generally from the so-called Global South to the North. Ultimately, the payment system is designed for those with more access to wealth to cover the costs of those with less access to wealth; we trust your discernment of how you personally fit into this global economic context.

S U G G E S T E D   F I N A N C I A L
C O N T R I B U T I O N S

• For people with medium to high access to wealth in the global context

(Middle class and Upper/Owning class people in the Global North, anyone with investments or retirement savings, anyone who expects an inheritance)

• FRIEND– $150 USD

• SUPPORTER– $250 USD

• PARTNER– $350 USD 

• For people with lower access to wealth in the global context

(Most people in the Global South and people who’ve been systematically disadvantaged or are Poor/Working class in the Global North)

• FRIEND– $50 USD

• SUPPORTER– $75 USD

• PARTNER– $100 USD

________

As you decide what amount to pay, we ask that you not only consider your present-day financial situation governed by income but also factors including:

• Historical discrimination faced by your peoples

• Your financial wealth (Do you have retirement savings?)

• Your access to income and financial wealth, both current and anticipated (How easily could you earn more income compared to other people in your country and in the world? Do you expect to receive an inheritance?)

• People counting on your financial livelihood including dependents and community members

• The socio-economic conditions of your locale (Relative to other places in your country and in the world)

• Profits from this course are shared between contributors and help us to continue to create meaningful content into the future.

Dr. Bayo Akomolafe is a philosopher, psychologist, professor, and poet. He is a teacher and public intellectual renowned for his unconventional views on global crises, activism, and social change.

Bayo dreams of composing a “weird politics”, a postnationalist emancipatory network of making sanctuary as inquiry, a village of technologies for fugitives.

In 2014, Dr. Akomolafe was invited to be the Special Envoy of the International Alliance for Localization, a project of Ancient Futures (USA). He left his lecturing position in Covenant University, Nigeria to help build this Alliance. Bayo has been Visiting Professor at Middlebury College, where he taught on his own formulated concepts of ‘transraciality’ and postactivism. He has also taught at Sonoma State University (CA, USA), Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, Canada), and Schumacher College (Totnes, England) – among other universities around the world. He currently lectures at Pacifica Graduate Institute, California and the University of Vermont, as an adjunct and associate professor, respectively. He sits on the Board of many organizations including Science and Non-Duality (SAND).

Now living between India and the United States, Bayo is a father of Alethea Aanya and Kyah Jayden Abayomi. He is married to EJ, his dear life-partner of Indian descent.

The convener of the concepts of ‘postactivism’, ‘transraciality’ and ‘ontofugitivity’, Bayo is a widely celebrated international speaker an award-winning 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. He is also the Executive Director and Chief Curator for The Emergence Network. He is writing his third book about the spirituality and emancipatory lessons of the transatlantic slave journeys, called The Times are Urgent, Let us Slow Down.

Co-Conspirators

GUEST TEACHERS

adrienne maree brown

Geci Karuri-Sebina

Joanna Macy

Makshya Tolbert

Vanessa Andreotti

ARTISTS

Ganavya

Ilu Oba

Penelope Baquero

CURATOR / PRODUCER

Jiordi Rosales

EDITOR

Evan Tenenbaum

ILLUSTRATION

Jon Marro

Jia Sung

DESIGN / PUBLISHING via For The Wild

Ayana Young

Erica Ekrem

Francesca Glaspell

Julia Jackson

Musical accompaniment by Rajna Swaminathan.

Related Episodes

For The Wild first spoke with Bayo in January of 2020, just before the world as we knew it would begin to fervently wind and unwind. We’ve cherished Bayo’s challenging thought process ever since, and know For The Wild listeners feel the same. If you’d like to delve deeper into Bayo’s work, we invite you to join Bayo Akomolafe and guests as they play with postactivism, bewilderment, making sanctuary, prayer, weird politics, desire, and the injustice of justice. We are honored to be able to house this synthesized course for our listeners and invite you to learn more about the course, cost, and accessibility below.