SLOW STUDY: Báyò Akómoláfé's We Will Dance with Mountains: Vunja!
Illustration by Jia Sung
For The Wild is thrilled to share that we’re launching our second Slow Study: We Will Dance With Mountains: Vunja! with Báyò Akómoláfé and The Emergence Network. This Slow Study is a unique collaboration between The Emergence Network and For The Wild focused on making the We Will Dance with Mountains course accessible in an asynchronous, self-paced manner so you can embrace slowness and integration in your study.
The segments featured in this Slow Study were recorded in 2023 as part of the We Will Dance with Mountains: Vunja! live sessions attended by over 1400 people around the world. We have edited the conversations and added supplementary materials so that you are able to go about this immersive, transformative course at your own pace.
“Let’s play here together for the time being before the portal shuts down. Let’s play here together. Let’s nibble at the edges. Let’s dance and contort our bodies. Maybe something might happen.”
The full package includes eight audio sessions with lectures, practices, music, poetry, and conversation from Báyò and his brilliant crew of co-conspirators. These are accompanied by recorded practice prompts from Jiordi Rosales and a text-based coursebook with details on each session and additional extrapolations.
Guest Teachers include: Sophie Strand, Mama V (formerly Eve Ensler), Resmaa Menakem, Orland Bishop, Geci Karuri-Sebina, Erin Manning, Mama Nef, Gogo Rutendo Lerato Ngara and more
Artists include: Ganavya, Samora Pinderhughes, Rajna Swaminathan, Immanuel Wilkins, Payam Yousefi, Shahzad Ismaily
The emergent material focuses on themes of grief, healing, white syncopation, the senses, musicality, and emergent cracks and edges. For those of you familiar with Báyò’s work, this offers a deeper dive into many of the topics he discusses, and for those of you who aren't, it’s an incredible introduction to a daring, winding form of thought.
For The Wild is deeply grateful to Báyò and our partners at The Emergence Network for this collaboration. We hope you enjoy this experience.
Welcome to the carnival, let’s dive into the cracks!
♫ The music featured in this announcement and within the Slow Study is by Ganavya.
Presale launches today, Dec 20!
The Slow Study course will officially launch on December 30th, and those who order during presale will receive the digital download of the course then. To celebrate those ordering early use code SLOWSTUDY10 to take 10% off of your purchase. Visit forthewild.world/vunja to learn more and purchase!
Get unlimited access to the course download which includes:
A 75-page Course Book with emergent curriculum, articles, and poetry in PDF format
8 Audio Lectures in MP3 format with over ten hours of explorative and provocative listening content
8 Transcripts in PDF format
8 Practices Prompts in audio and written format to support you along your way and bring the teaching a bit further into your own life
Photo of Bayo Akomolafe
Báyò Akómoláfé (Ph.D.), rooted with the Yoruba people in a more-than-human world, is the father to Alethea Aanya and Kyah Jayden Abayomi, the grateful life-partner to EJ, son and brother. A widely celebrated international speaker, posthumanist thinker, poet, teacher, self-styled ‘trans-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 (along with Professors Molefi Kete Asante and Augustine Nwoye).
Báyò Akómoláfé is the visionary founder of The Emergence Network, a planet-wide networking project and inquiry at the edges of the Anthropocene that seeks to convene new kinds of responsivities, sensuous solidarities, and experimental practices for a posthumanist parapolitics. He is host of the postactivist course/festival/event, We Will Dance with Mountains and curator of Dancing with Mountains, the educational consultation. He currently lectures at Pacifica Graduate Institute, California. He sits on the Board of many organizations.
Dr. Akómoláfé is the Hubert Humphrey Distinguished Professor of American Studies in Macalester College, Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA (August 2025), a Member of the Club of Rome and an Ambassador for the Wellbeing Economy Alliance. He is currently writing is third book, An Ocean of Milk: Morality, Desire, and the Monster at the Edge of the World.
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.
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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.