The Wandering, Winding Way of the Wound or the Politics of Cure, the Shadows of Harm Reduction, and Transgressive Networks of Care at World End was a webinar hosted by Bayo Akomolafe at SAND in 2022. This excerpt is from the opening day of the course.
Purchase the entire four-day course here
Themes addressed in the webinar include:
- the need for new therapeutic configurations, a politics and aesthetics given to the eruption of the new and the unthought.
- investigate what modern subjectivity obscures, to trace the lineage of bodily manufacture within industrial arrangements, and to touch the far edges of our bodies and porous membranous skins, long enough to taste their insectoid secretions.
- We focus not on what gets in the way of healing, but on what healing gets in the way of.
- We think through contermoder, animist, Yoruba ideas of agency to investigate the way the city produces wellbeing.
- We inquire about what is obscured in the co-productions of healing/justice/wholeness as recovery, when framed as a return to the familiar images we are used to.
Ultimately, as we examine wounds as animist vocations or as multi-species ecologies, we aim to co-weave a decolonial aesthetic of submerged memory, of secret longing, of silenced suspicions, of unbridled magic, of pedagogical possibility, of sensuous touch, and of therapeutic potency.
Bayo Akomolafe (Ph.D.), rooted with the Yoruba people in a more-than-human world, is the father to Alethea and Kyah, 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 and host of the online postactivist course, ‘We Will Dance with Mountains’. He currently lectures at Pacifica Graduate Institute, California and University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont. 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 has also been appointed Senior Fellow for The New Institute in Hamburg, Germany. He is the recipient of the New Thought Leadership Award 2021 and the Excellence in Ethnocultural Psychotherapy Award by the African Mental Health Summit 2022.
Check out our recent podcast from this series with Sophie Strand and Bayo:
