When You Fall Apart, Don’t Forget to Love the Pieces with Bayo Akomolafe, (Ph.D.)
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What if we've got disability wrong?
Some of the perspectival frames that support our investigations into disability promote cultures of integration and inclusion.
However, while we need paradigms of inclusivity, they constitutionally reinforce the familiar, the known. In this talk, Bayo Akomolafe thinks about disability as a field of intensity - instead of as the property of individuals.
Telling the story of how the Yoruba people - once stolen from their shores and shoved into cargo ships bound for the New World - became a resilient diasporic spiritual force far away from the familiar, Bayo makes the case that these cybernetic flows (or disability) that challenge bodies and their claims to wholeness have transformative potential. With this, he builds his theory of making sanctuary as a politics of descent in troubling times.
Bayo Akomolafe is the grateful life-partner to ‘EJ’, father to Alethea Aanya and Kyah Jayden Abayomi, son of Olufunmilayo Ibidapo Akomolafe and Ignatius Abayomi Akomolafe, and descendant of Yoruba fields of archetypal becomings and mythopoeic landscapes.
He is an author, celebrated speaker, teacher, and self-styled trans-public intellectual (a concept imagined together with and inspired by the shamanic priesthood of the Yoruba healer-trickster)- whose vocation goes beyond justice and speaking truth to power to opening up other spaces of power-with, and queering fond formulations and configurations of hope.
As Visionary Founder and Elder of The Emergence Network and Chief Host of the widely popular online-offline course/festival series, We Will Dance with Mountains, Bayo curates an earth-wide project for the re-calibration of our ability to respond to civilizational crisis – a project framed within a material feminist/posthumanist/postactivist ethos and inspired by Yoruba indigenous cosmologies.
He considers this a shared art – exploring the edges of the intelligible, dancing with posthumanist ideas, dabbling in the mysteries of quantum mechanics and the liberating sermon of an ecofeminism text, and talking with others about how to host a festival of radical silence on a street in London – and part of his inner struggle to regain a sense of rootedness to his community.
