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The Gift of Fading Away – A Talk by Bayo Akomolafe

March 18, 2018, 7:00-9:00 Pm, Greensboro, Nc

(Sponsored by the Center for Education, Imagination and the Natural World)

REGISTER ONLINE

March 18, 2018, 7-9 p.m.
The Sanctuary at Church of the Covenant
501 South Mendenhall Street.
Greensboro, NC 27403
Cost: $25
Advance registrations required at:
http://www.beholdnature.org/thegiftoffadingaway.php

Our modern lives are built on the foundation of a truism: that we are the center of the world, and that nature around us is a mere backdrop for human activity. In recent imagination, nature has mounted an irresistible insurgency, shocking us by spilling through, by disturbing our calculations, by infiltrating our purity, and closing the presumed distance between us. In this talk about culture, losing faith, meeting loss, seeking home, and dealing with toxic futures, Bayo Akomolafe speaks about the cracks, openings and undoing of our former stories of certainty, and why we can make do with “dwelling in the meantime.” The call to honor our entanglement with place and planet invites a strange but familiar vocation of recognizing we are fading away, and that this is ironically our deepest source of hope for justice.

Bayo Akomolafe (Ph.D.) is Chief Curator and Executive Director of The Emergence Network. He is author of These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to my Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home (North Atlantic Books, 2017) and We will tell our own Story (Universal Write Publications LLC, 2016). Lecturer, speaker, father, and “rogue planet saved by the gravitational pull” of his wife Ijeoma Clement Akomolafe (Director, Broken Compass), Bayo hopes to inspire a diffractive network of sharing within an ethos of new responsivity – a slowing down, an ethics of entanglement, an activism of inquiry, a ‘politics of surprise’. Born into a Yoruba family, Bayo graduated summa cum laude in psychology in 2006 at Covenant University (Nigeria), and then was invited to take up a lecturing position. Largely nurtured and trained in a world that increasingly fell short of his deepest desires for justice, Bayo conducted doctoral research into Yoruba indigenous healing systems as part of his inner struggle to regain a sense of rootedness to his community. He has been speaking about his experiences around the world since those moments back in 2011. Bayo understands he is on a shared decolonial journey with his family to live a small, intense life. He is an ecstatic (and often exhausted, but grateful) father to Alethea Aanya and Kyah Jayden.