In his recent essay, “The Children of the Minotaur” OBI Global Senior Fellow Bayo Akomolafe invites us to reconsider the very essence of belonging and democracy against the backdrop of climate chaos, geopolitical upheavals, and declining trust in democratic institutions from less familiar vantage points. If liberal democracy were an art project, who or what would be the curator? What ingredients would need to be present to compose a compelling account of democratic citizenship in the 21st century? And what stories, archetypes, choreographies, cartographies, and concepts might help us reconvene freshly stimulating accounts of the ways we are governed, named, and held in regimes of belonging?
Join us on Thursday, February 2024 (8:00 AM - 9:30 AM PST / 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM ET / 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM CET) for our next event in the ongoing series The Edges in the Middle, where philosopher and political theorist Achille Mbembe and Bayo will think with and through everyday objects around us to explore liberal democracy, its limitations, and its possible futures. The objective is not to present a definitive view on democracy, but to embark on a provisional, tentative, and tactile adventure in shared inquiry about the sensorial field of democracy that raises new questions in our journeying together.
How do we catch people where they fall? How do we respond to this crisis in a way that doesn’t reinforce its architecture? What kind of politics is being summoned at this time?
Join OBI’s Democracy & Belonging Forum on Thursday, November 16, 2023 (8:00 AM - 9:15 AM PT / 11:00 AM - 12:15 PM ET / 5:00 PM - 6:15 PM CET) for the next conversation in our ongoing series The Edges in the Middle, where OBI Global Senior Fellow Bayo Akomolafe will speak with Professor Sa’ed Atshan and OBI’s Cecilie Surasky on holding each other’s pain even as lines are increasingly drawn around whose lives are grievable and whose are not.
As Israel continues its relentless bombardment of Gaza following Hamas’ murder of 1,400 Israeli civilians, which itself came after 75 years of Israeli occupation over Palestine, so many of us feel hopeless under the weight of bearing witness to—or personally experiencing—seemingly endless cycles of violence, trauma, and dehumanization.
Starting from the premise that all people belong and all lives are grievable, the speakers will explore how honoring each other’s grief may allow us to reclaim each other’s humanity and perhaps shed light on a path forward to belonging in Israel-Palestine, for Muslims, Jews, and Christians, and for all people around the world. Bayo, Sa’ed, and Cecilie will journey into what it might be like to glimpse at the world through tears: what visions are possible when we postpone the compulsion to see everything clearly?
What does democracy and belonging mean in the context of the Anthropocene, amidst warming skies, broken floodgates, pandemics, red tide algal blooms, bleached reefs, and migrant borders? Join the Democracy & Belonging Forum on Thursday, July 6, 2023 (8:00 AM - 9:30 AM PT / 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM ET / 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM CET) for the next mbari in the ongoing series The Edges in the Middle.
Hope thrives at all costs.
Join us on Thursday, May 4, 2023 (9:00 AM - 10:30 AM PST / 12:00 PM - 1:30 PM ET / 6:00 PM - 7:30 PM CET) for our next event in the ongoing series The Edges in the Middle, where OBI Global Senior Fellow Bayo Akomolafe will meet with celebrated Canadian author, professor, and social activist Naomi Klein; and, Dr. Yuria Celidwen, a scholar of Indigenous Nahua and Maya descent from the highlands of Chiapas (Mexico), Senior Fellow of OBI, and thinker whose work straddles the intersections between Indigenous studies, cultural psychology, and contemplative science. Together, we will explore the untrod path with feet unshod; we will construct a stranger thesis that calls into question – if only for a moment – the anthropocentricity of hope in becoming-responsive to explosive transformations. We will investigate the agency of grief, the invitation nestled within the idea that to stand a chance, we might need to fall.
Bayo Akomolafe's most recent essay on the limits of Black excellence and the risks of recognition forces strange a strange consideration: what if justice gets in the way of the transformations we yearn for? Watch our latest event in the ongoing series The Edges in the Middle, where scholar and activist Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Global Senior Fellow Bayo Akomolafe explored Black identity, Black excellence, and the limits of seeking inclusion.
Indy Johar of Dark Matter Labs and Global Senior Fellow Bayo Akomolafe explore a set of questions about the self: what if the self is not as estranged or as independent as we often suppose it is? If we are to take seriously notions of entanglement and ecological imbrications, how do we come to see identity? What might this mean for democracy, for our understanding of our roles as temporality-makers, for the Anthropocene, and for the future?
In this conversation, V (formerly known as Eve Ensler, award-winning author of The Vagina Monologues) and Global Senior Fellow Bayo Akomolafe explore 'Congo' - not merely as a country in Central Africa and site of V's "City of Joy", but as a useful metaphor to explore contemporary politics. In a time when things are heating up (quite literally), V and Bayo will examine and discuss trauma, forgiveness, healing, safety, and a politics that goes beyond.
Taking the promise of getting along as an entry point into an exploration of authoritarian populism, racism, activist burnout, hope, and the hidden costs of victory, Dr. Báyò Akómoláfé and OBI Director john a. powell examine mainstream assumptions that reduce belonging to a “we-all-get-along” inclusivity: What if the very indigestibility of the other calls for new ways of framing identity and the promise of politics? Where are the thirst-quenching waters in a time of fire and fury?
