For The Wild is elated to share Bayo Akomolafe’s Slow Study: We Will Dance With Mountains: Into The Cracks! – a learning journey for you to explore from home at your own pleasurable pace.

“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 the first musical notes of worlds to come.”

— Bayo Akomolafe

This Slow Study is a series of lectures and practice prompts from Bayo’s 2021 edition of We Will Dance With Mountains: Into the Cracks! wherein 1000+ people gathered. It 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 experience is brought forth by a vast network of co-conspirators, fugitives, dancers, thinkers, children, elders, and creatives including adrienne maree brown, Geci Karuri-Sebina, Joanna Macy, Makshya Tolbert, Vanessa Andreotti, Ganavya, Ilu Oba, and Penelope Baquero, Rajna Swaminathan, Jiordi Rosales, Evan Tenenbaum, Jon Marro, Jia Sung and more.

“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.”

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.”

♫ Musical accompaniment featured in this announcement is "Offering" by Rajna Swaminathan.

EXPLORE THESE CONVERSATIONS FROM FEATURED TEACHERS

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SLOW STUDY: Báyò Akómoláfé's We Will Dance with Mountains: Vunja!

This Slow Study Course is a series of lectures and practice prompts from Bayo’s 2023 edition of We Will Dance With Mountains: Vunja! wherein 1400+ people gathered. It is a carnivalesque course in postactivism, a decoration of the walls of the cracks, a cultivating of bewilderment together, and a sitting-together-until-something-happens.

Dr. BÁYÒ AKÓMOLÁFÉ on Ontological Mutiny /338

Ayana and Báyò dance together through questions of crisis, identity, and rupture. As we attempt to break from the monoculture that cements us as citizen subjects of empire, Báyò suggests that we need an ontological mutiny.

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

This Slow Study Course is a series of lectures and practice prompts from Bayo’s 2021 edition of We Will Dance With Mountains: Into the Cracks! wherein 1000+ people gathered. It is a carnivalesque course in postactivism, a matter of fissures, fault lines, cracks, openings, seismic shifts, endings, and fugitive marronage.

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

This Slow Study Course is a series of lectures and practice prompts from Bayo’s 2021 edition of We Will Dance With Mountains: Into the Cracks! wherein 1000+ people gathered. It is a carnivalesque course in postactivism, a matter of fissures, fault lines, cracks, openings, seismic shifts, endings, and fugitive marronage.

Dr. BAYO AKOMOLAFE on Coming Alive to Other Senses /300

Bayo Akomolafe guides listeners on a journey to lose oneself and leave behind the ties that bind us to world views that do not serve humanity’s wholeness. Bayo challenges us to lean into the “political un-project” that is fugitivity, blurring societally-imposed binaries, in order to better understand the human territory and to make more-than-human sanctuary through post activism.

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

Bayo invites us 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? What happens when we unfurl into a space of slowness and relinquish human mastery to a wider cosmic net of relations?

adrienne maree brown on Writing Our Future /278

In the shift from panic to practice, visionary fiction is vital medicine, and adrienne guides us to stretch our minds to see a future beyond what the confines of white supremacy, colonialism, heteropatriarchy, and capitalism tell us is possible.

JOANNA MACY on the World As Lover And Self ⌠ENCORE⌡/207

As we find ourselves alive in this time of great turning, where feelings of grief, despair, and gloom are omnipresent, we seek counsel from Joanna on finding emotional courage, building allyship, and practicing gratitude for all which moves us. Joanna offers her wisdom for remaining sane and grounded as life-long activists in the uphill battle of ecological crisis.

ADRIENNE MAREE BROWN on Pleasure as Birthright /115

Explore how the denial of pleasure contributes to our own oppression, how radical honesty and kindness can transform our relationships, moving through the limitations placed on radical imagination and desire, the importance of pleasure beyond sex, and how our pain and sorrow is a measurement of our pleasure and joy.

ADRIENNE MAREE BROWN on Emergent Strategy⌠ENCORE⌡/68

At the heart of adrienne marie brown’s, Emergent Strategy, is moving towards life and learning from the wisdom of nature to drive our social movements. Emergent Strategy asks of us to think about spirituality and transformative justice central to the resilient future we are imagining together.

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For The Wild Podcast

For The Wild is a slow media organization dedicated to land-based protection, co-liberation, and intersectional storytelling. We are rooted in a paradigm shift away from human supremacy, endless growth, and consumerism. As we dream towards a world of grounded justice and reciprocity, our work highlights impactful stories and deeply-felt meaning making as balms for these times.

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