In this emergent conversation with Bayo Akomolafe and host Eugenia, we explore the monstrous and how de-patologizing any monstrous aspect leads to unveiling new ways of understanding, experiencing and thus transforming public and private affairs.

The conversation explores the concept of the monster and its potential for generative and transformative politics. The monster is seen as that which cannot be sensed or represented, disrupting our familiar arrangements and exposing the violence we are already in. Courage is seen as an ecological secretion, an infection that invites us to stay with the monster and embrace its disruptive potential. The conversation also touches on the importance of embracing imperfection, breaking societal arrangements, and recognizing our entanglement with the world and technology. Non-attachment is seen as emerging from attachment, and there is an acknowledgment that there is no final arrangement or perfection to be attained.

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Bayo Akomolafe is an intellectual, post-activist, philosopher, poet, writer, teacher, speaker. He’s a father and proud partner. He has lectured and visited  many universities and institutions around the world as is a renowed and accaimed speaeker recognized for his poetic, unconventional, counterintuitive, and indigenous take on global crisis, civic action and social change.

He is Executive Director and Chief curator of the emergence network and recently appointed the first Scholar in Residence of the Aspen Global Leadership Network and of the Schumacher College for a New Economics.  

 “Bayo hopes 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.