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Bayo Akomolafe Talks Walls

Bayo Akomolafe
On March 24, at 6pm, Dr. Bayo Akomolafe will speak about the metaphor and meaning of “Walls” in this time of resurgence of white supremacy, gentrification, religious exclusivism, and geopolitical exceptionalism. The event will be held at the Glaser Center of the Unitarian Universalist Church on Mendocino Avenue in Santa Rosa, Calif.

The event is free and open to the public and is sponsored by the Diversity Working Group and the Social Justice Advocacy Group of the Unitarian Church, Interfaith Council of Sonoma County, Racial Justice Allies of Sonoma County, and the Center for Babaylan Studies. Click for details.

Dr. Akomolafe is a Nigerian scholar living in Chennai, India. He is a frequently-invited speaker internationally and is known for his passionate, creative, and critical inquiries about the narratives that we in the U.S. often take for granted as fact and true. In both his writing and speaking engagements he invites us to pose different questions and imagine other sources of power. He tackles a wide-ranging exploration of topics in his book, These Wilds Beyond Our Fences (North Atlantic Books, 2017).

He is the Initiating/Coordinating Curator for The Emergence Network (A Post-Activist Project), and host of the online writing course, "We will dance with Mountains: Writing as a Tool for Emergence," As Coordinating Curator of The Emergence Network, Dr. Akomolafe works with other curators to inspire a diffractive network of sharing – a slowing down, an ethics of entanglement, an activism of inquiry, a ‘politics of surprise’…one that does not treat the crises of our times as exterior to ‘us’ or the ‘solutions’ that conventional activism offers as discrete or separate from the problems that we seek to nullify.

In his words:
We are once again in a time of walls. As a stubborn whiff of gentrification, geopolitical exceptionalism, religious exclusivism and white normativity sweeps across the lands, inviting many of us to ‘wall up’ and turn inwards in a quest for essences and pure identities, the prospects of irrecoverable fragmentation have perhaps never been more worrying. But beyond dividing us, walls are serving a more ironic purpose, offering us an unexpected gift: walls give us an opportunity to witness how things spill into each other, and how unsettling the world really is – so unsettling in fact that walls themselves seem to be part of a deeper conspiracy. In a time of separation, we are learning of our entanglement; we are noticing that the world is alive; she moves and breathes; we are coming to terms with our humble place in a vibrant web of becoming; and, we are learning that we are implicated in each other in a way no barricade could refute.
During his visit to Sonoma County, Dr. Akomolafe will also give talks at the HUB Center for Diversity, Vitality, and Creativity at Sonoma State University on March 27, 10am and 7:30pm, at the Student Union Building. All Sonoma State events featuring Dr. Akomolafe are  free and open to the public.

For more information about these events, email Christopher Bowers or call 707-694-8455.

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