Losing Ourselves

Together

An Evening with Bayo Akomolafe

March 17, 2024

Resource Center for Nonviolence
Santa Cruz, CA

“The times are urgent. We must slow down.”

— Bayo Akomolafe

Join us for an evening with Bayo Akomolafe, a unique and visionary postactivist thinker who poses unconventional theories about how to respond to the collective challenges of our times.

The thought project of postactivism proceeds from, and is deeply rooted in, Indigenous traditions around the world, and invites us to recognize that we are part of the more-than-human world—a necessary acknowledgement to help shift our strategies of justice outside of human-centered systems of thought.

Bayo invites the opening of cracks, so that we may fall through and discover creative approaches that might involve dissolution over solutions, generative failure over linear success, and emergence over certainty.

For this evening, we will lose ourselves together in these cracks as we invite one another into deep listening, community co-creation, ceremony, song and the mystery.

Bayo Akomolafe

Bayo Akomolafe, PhD, 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 Ije, son and brother. A widely celebrated international speaker, posthumanist thinker, poet, 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, Bayo Akomolafe is the Founder of The Emergence Network, a planet-wide initiative that seeks to convene communities in new ways in response to the critical, civilizational challenges we face as a species. He is host of the postactivist course/festival/event, ‘We Will Dance with Mountains’. He currently lectures at Pacifica Graduate Institute, California. He sits on the Board of many organizations including Science and Non-Duality (US) and Ancient Futures (Australia).

In July 2022, Dr. Akomolafe was appointed the inaugural Global Senior Fellow of University of California’s (Berkeley) Othering and Belonging Institute. He is also the inaugural Special Fellow of the Schumacher Centre for New Economics and the Inaugural Special Fellow for the Aspen Institute. He has been Fellow for The New Institute in Hamburg, Germany, and Visiting Critic-in-Residence for the Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles (2023).

He is the recipient of an Honorary Doctorate from California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) and has been Commencement Speaker in two universities convocation events. He is also the recipient of the New Thought Leadership Award 2021 and the Excellence in Ethnocultural Psychotherapy Award by the African Mental Health Summit 2022. In a ceremony in July 2023, the City of Portland (Maine, USA) awarded Dr. Akomolafe with the symbolic ‘Key to the City’ in recognition of his planet-wide work and achievements.

Dr. Akomolafe is a Member of the Club of Rome, a Fellow for the Royal Society of Arts in the UK, and an Ambassador for the Wellbeing Economy Alliance. Learn more about Bayo by exploring his website or at Emergence Network.