Who do we trust?

When there is fire on the mountain, who do we trust?

This recorded workshop with Bayo Akomolafe will explore the politics of these moments, the competing sites for attention, the circling gods plangent in their demands for worship, the broken pillars and altars, the stretched out fabric of trust in a pandemic. This workshop is about science, belief, knowing, and the psychological urgency of making our way through very fluid and troubling moments.

You may have noticed that the ongoing pandemic arrived with more than epidemiological effects. It’s changed everything: what we do when we meet people; how we determine what we need; how we relate to and understand ‘science’ and authorities; how we eat, play, believe, love, and come into touch.

This is because cataclysmic shifts do not just affect the physical world in and around us, they potentially alter the social fabric of our myriad relationships. They disturb the ideas we’ve cherished, and compel new directions. One might say that trust – precious and vital in how we forge life-giving or life-denying relationships – is geological-epidemiological. A very public event.

Who do we trust in these fluid times? And what do we believe? How do we relate with those that believe things that endanger our bodies? This workshop with Bayo Akomolafe (Ph.D.) is about trust – not just the relationships we make but the stressors and traumatic events that influence the texture of our complex relations. It is about “crisis” (in its archetypal, mythological and historical resonances) and the critical openings presented to us to rework the ways we attend to the world around us. It is about making sanctuary during an earthquake.

More specifically, it is about the hidden life of belief, about knowing, science, conspiracy theories and other ways of making sense of the cultural skirmishes that characterize our days. Bayo Akomolafe will cover topics such as postactivism, making sanctuary, belief as ecology, the nature of the scientific method, and how we risk returning to a vaguely familiar normal if we do not make use of these critical openings.

With stories from his Yoruba people, collective exercises, creative breakouts, and poetry, Bayo Akomolafe will lead this workshop at the liminal edges of new worlds wanting to be born. Join us, trust us, create with us – only if it feels hospitable to the questions burning for you right now.

Is this for you?

  • If you do not want to return to unbothered “normal”,
  • if you have new questions that don’t seem to have answers provided within the dominant myth,
  • if you would like to wrestle with the prevalent ideas about the political neutrality and supremacy of western science,
  • and if you’d like to come alive to sensuous new directions that might lead to new/wilder coalitions, then this workshop is probably for you.

Key information:

DATES:

LOCATION:
A recorded workshop

FEE: £45

Facilitator details

Bayo Akomolafe

Bayo Akomolafe

Bayo Akomolafe (PhD) is the father of Alethea Aanya and Kyah Abayomi and life-partner to Ije. He is a teacher, lecturer, speaker and an author of books such These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home and We Will Tell our Own Stories! He is the Chief Curator and Director of The Emergence Network.
bayoakomolafe.net / course.bayoakomolafe.net
Emergencenetwork.org