You’re Invited to Join
Báyò Akómoláfé for a Philosopical Exploration…
Growing up in the Christo-centric southwestern worlds of Lagos, Nigeria, Báyò Akómoláfé imbibed a familiar notion of the soul from multiple evenings spent taking notes at Pentecostal revival assemblies and church sermons on Sundays. An image slowly distilled through years of education, through the tears that remembered his father’s death, and through a precocious determination to ask questions that mattered: the soul was the disembodied replica of the self that lurked between the neuronal thresholds and sinews of the material body. The ghost in the machine. The essence that escaped death. A private thing.
Losing his faith meant Báyò found new ways of rethinking the soul that avoided questions about the moment a foetus was ensouled, how materials so fundamentally different as soul and substance could interact meaningfully, and – most critically – why popular understandings of the soul severely delinked it from ecology, politics, history, and the poetics of death.
Báyò's Thoughts on Where We Stand Now…
Today, Dr. Báyò Akómoláfé believes that “the soul” is a break in time, a rupture in design, a mispronunciation of the familiar. Instead of being a stabilized entity within stabilized selves, the soul is a sideways-travelling, slant-eyed, oblique cartography across the fabric of the political – an awkward, wandering line. With this, Akomolafe connects the political, the theological, the civilizational, the technological, the psychotherapeutic, and the mythological into a cosmopoetics of surprise.
Using the concept of ch’ihónít’i, his articulation of the “Second Fall”, his emerging exploration of obliquity, and his theory of parapoetics, Akómoláfé suggests that we are wearing out the accommodative hospitality of the systems we’ve long occupied.
In a time of tariff wars and TikTok algorithms and AI uncanny valleys, genocide and climate anxiety, democratic failures and proto-fascist uprisings, when to know anything is to ignite hidden circuitries and reinforce corporate borders and logics, we are coming to the end of care as we know it. To address this moment isn’t merely to “get better”, to “integrate”, or to “ascend”: it is to travel awkwardly.
Perhaps in sensing the way the soul travels, we might know a world more surprising than the myths we’ve been told.
Explore all of this and more in Báyò’s upcoming webinar…
Why you should register for this webinar with Báyò Akómoláfé …
Join us if you’d like to be part of Báyò’s larger exploration of these topics in his upcoming course, Mbari: Art, Bodies, and Care at the End of the World – and think that participating in this webinar might bring you closer to deciding. There’ll be opportunities to speak with Bayo directly about the course and to ask questions about participating.
Join us if you sense that you can no longer travel straightforwardly or in the marked-out narrow lanes of “good citizenship”, especially if you sense that politics-as-usual obscures too much.
Join us to honour the cracks in these moments. The grief of these hours. The questions we don’t have answers to. The wellness rituals that don’t meet us in the bone-deep areas of need. Join us at the evanescent end of a teardrop trail, where the awkward splinters into wonder.
Meet your presenter:
Dr. Báyò Akómoláfé
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 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, Báyò Akómoláfé 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. Akómoláfé 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, the Inaugural Scholar in Residence for the Aspen Institute, the inaugural Special Fellow for the Council of an Uncertain Human Future, as well as Visiting Scholar to Clark University,Massachusetts, USA (2024). 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 the 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. Akómoláfé with the symbolic ‘Key to the City’ in recognition of his planet-wide work and achievements.
Dr. Akómoláfé 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.