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Rigour & Flow with Aiwan and Tamanda
Rigour & Flow with Aiwan and Tamanda
35 episodes
5 days ago

The show where business meets love, and culture meets critique. We’re Aiwan and Tamanda, two Black women with 20 years each in entertainment, research, and social justice. We’re also a married couple figuring out what it means to build a life and two businesses together.


We'll talk about the realities of running a business, making creative work that matters, and navigating research with integrity.


What You’ll Find:

  • Honest conversations on entrepreneurship, research, and creativity.
  • Unpacking the intersections of business, leadership, relationships, and identity.
  • Hot takes on media, culture, and social change.
  • Guest insights from entrepreneurs, researchers, and artists.

If you’re navigating business, love, and the messiness of life while trying to do meaningful work, you’re in the right place.

Episodes drop every Tuesday!


Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Society & Culture,
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All content for Rigour & Flow with Aiwan and Tamanda is the property of Rigour & Flow with Aiwan and Tamanda and is served directly from their servers with no modification, redirects, or rehosting. The podcast is not affiliated with or endorsed by Podjoint in any way.

The show where business meets love, and culture meets critique. We’re Aiwan and Tamanda, two Black women with 20 years each in entertainment, research, and social justice. We’re also a married couple figuring out what it means to build a life and two businesses together.


We'll talk about the realities of running a business, making creative work that matters, and navigating research with integrity.


What You’ll Find:

  • Honest conversations on entrepreneurship, research, and creativity.
  • Unpacking the intersections of business, leadership, relationships, and identity.
  • Hot takes on media, culture, and social change.
  • Guest insights from entrepreneurs, researchers, and artists.

If you’re navigating business, love, and the messiness of life while trying to do meaningful work, you’re in the right place.

Episodes drop every Tuesday!


Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Show more...
Personal Journals
Business,
Society & Culture,
Entrepreneurship,
Relationships
Episodes (20/35)
Rigour & Flow with Aiwan and Tamanda
Super Rich Africans | The Soft Life & Hard Truths of Class

We turn our gaze to the glittering world of Africa’s super rich - and ask what wealth really means in a world built on inequality.


Beginning with the BBC documentary From Lagos to London: The Rise of Nigeria’s Super Rich, we unpack the rise of “soft-life” culture, the myth of meritocracy, and the emotional price of Black excellence. From oil money and old elites to Instagram entrepreneurs and Dubai Bling escapism, we explore how class divides shape not only who gets to live well - but whose stories get told as success.


From there, we widen the lens. Tamanda reflects on growing up between Botswana, South Africa, and Britain - seeing wealth, domestic work, and dignity collide inside her own family history. Aiwan recalls her first reaction to the From Lagos to London BBC documentary in 2016 - the thrill of representation, the absurdity of diamond-encrusted phones, and the unease of celebrating excess while living through austerity.


Together, we map the fault-lines between aspiration and accountability, asking how we can enjoy the good life without reproducing the hierarchies we claim to resist.


Along the way, we confront the paradox of privilege: the soft-life that depends on someone else’s hard one; the excellence that excludes; the success that can’t always look itself in the mirror.     


🎧 In this episode:

  • From Lagos to London: BBC’s portrait of Nigeria’s new elite and what it revealed about class pride and cultural cringe
  • Soft-life vs. survival: how social media turned aspiration into performance
  • Oil, old money & influence: why most wealth isn’t as self-made as it looks
  • Private schools, “area boys” and the classed accents of belonging
  • Dubai Bling & Young, Famous & African: when representation becomes replication
  • Cuppy, Amosu & the entrepreneur myth: grit, guilt and gold-threaded suits
  • Respectability politics in Black spaces: how class mimics colonial etiquette
  • What does accountability look like when we’ve “made it”?


🎧 Listen wherever you get your podcasts

🎥 Watch the full episode on YouTube

🔁 Share with someone thinking about wealth, class or “soft-life” culture

📬 Reflections or stories to share? rigourandflow@gmail.com


⚠️ Content note: discussion includes class inequality, elitism, and structural violence.

Please rate, review and subscribe for weekly episodes.

Connect with us on:

  • TikTok
  • Instagram
  • LinkedIn
  • AiAi Studios
  • Roots & Rigour


This is an AiAi Studios Production

©AiAi Studios 2025


Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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5 days ago
1 hour 43 minutes 9 seconds

Rigour & Flow with Aiwan and Tamanda
Bad Gals Get The Corner Office | Millie Odhiambo, Black Wildlife Filmmaking & Class Difference

The original African Bad Gal gets us going, Kenyan MP and activist Millie Odhiambo Mabona, whose fearless voice and legendary one-liners have cut through flaccid politics with candour. From calling out men on the parliamentary floor on decisions, periods (!), to publishing her book Rig or Be Rigged, Millie embodies the unapologetic role needed for women to step into power. 


From there, we pivot to the plains, asking why the wildlife stories of Africa are still told through a White lens. Where are the Black filmmakers in natural history and conservation media? From Botswana’s Tourism Board to BBC studios, we trace the complex landscape of access, ancestral knowledge and representation in this important space.


Finally, we turn the lens inward for a segment that’s equal parts rigour and self-reflection: After an anonymous comment called out a previous episode on Black Britishness, Tamanda and Aiwan unpack what happens when class and accountability collide in our own communities - and why words absolutely DO matter in a world that too easily wants to delete them (after rightfully expressing them).


🎧 In this episode:

  1. Unfiltered & Ignited | Mille and the Importance of the Women Who Refuse to Shrink
  2. Access, Ancestry & Archaic Colonial Doccies | Where Are the Black African Wildlife Filmmakers? 
  3. On the Record | Class Difference, Dead Naming and the Disrespect in Respectability Politics


🎧 Listen wherever you get your podcasts

🎥 Watch the full episode on YouTube

🔁 Share with a Bad Gal who speaks the truth and rewrites respectability rules

📬 Reflections or stories to share? Email us: rigourandflow@gmail.com

Please rate, review and subscribe for weekly episodes.

Connect with us on:

  • TikTok
  • Instagram
  • LinkedIn
  • AiAi Studios
  • Roots & Rigour


This is an AiAi Studios Production

©AiAi Studios 2025


Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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1 week ago
1 hour 4 minutes 41 seconds

Rigour & Flow with Aiwan and Tamanda
How a Fake African Agony Aunt Shaped a Generation: The Men Behind “Dear Dolly”

We travel back to the glossy pages that raised us - the agony-aunt columns, gossip spreads, and advice pages that shaped girlhood across Africa and beyond.


At the centre of the story is Dear Dolly - an advice column that captured the hearts of readers across the continent of Africa, answering questions about love, shame, and desire. What few people knew was that, in the early days at least, “Dolly” wasn’t a woman at all, but a group of men writing under her name. 


Reading directly from the Drum magazine archives, we dive into real letters from the 1960s and 70s - from women asking about cheating husbands and body image, to queer readers cautiously revealing their desires in a deeply heteronormative world. We sit with the tenderness, the absurdity, and the harm in those pages: the empathy that sometimes peeked through, and the patriarchy printed between the lines.


Together we ask what these columns reveal about love, morality, and modernity in post-colonial Africa - and how their logics still echo today, from tabloid talk shows to TikTok advice culture.


🎧 In this episode:

  • The secret life of Dear Dolly - how men became agony aunts,and moral arbiters of women’s lives
  • Dear Dolly advice columns - live and direct from the archives
  • Marriage, fatphobia, and the policing of women’s bodies
  • Patriarchy in print: how advice columns shaped women’s morality
  • Queer love, shame, and silence in 1960s advice columns
  • “Good girl” scripts, body image, and the policing of women’s behaviour
  • From Drum to gal-dem: the rise of Black women’s magazines
  • The evolution from agony aunt to algorithm - how advice culture never really died


🎧 Listen wherever you get your podcasts

🎥 Watch the full episode on YouTube

🔁 Share with someone raised on the magazines that taught us who to be

📬 Reflections or stories to share? Email us: rigourandflow@gmail.com

⚠️ Content note: discussion includes gendered violence, body shaming, and references to mental health.



Please rate, review and subscribe for weekly episodes.

Connect with us on:

  • TikTok
  • Instagram
  • LinkedIn
  • AiAi Studios
  • Roots & Rigour


This is an AiAi Studios Production

©AiAi Studios 2025


Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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2 weeks ago
56 minutes 2 seconds

Rigour & Flow with Aiwan and Tamanda
The Land Is Still Not Ours | Colonial Legacies, Reparations & Climate Crisis

We step into the charged terrain of land, power, and belonging - and ask who really gets to claim ownership of land in Africa.  Beginning with a screening of The Battle for Laikipia at Hyde Park Picture House, we trace the tensions between Indigenous Samburu pastoralists and fourth-generation white settlers in Kenya - and unravel how the logic of private property, colonial inheritance, and climate crisis continue to shape who eats, who survives, and who gets fenced out.


From there, we widen the lens. Tamanda connects the film’s themes to her own family history across Botswana, South Africa, and Britain - from childhood memories of “the boy” on white relatives’ farms to a recent, real-life story of stolen oranges and guinea fowl that became a parable of modern policing versus ancestral justice. Aiwan brings a filmmaker’s eye to the ethics of empathy and the politics of whose pain is centred, then flips the frame to Yellowstone and the global story of land as commodity - whether in Montana, Laikipia, or the post-colonial south.


Along the way, we confront the colonial hangover that refuses to die: white settlers who never left, governments that compensate the oppressor before the oppressed, and a climate emergency exposing the same old inequalities in new forms.


In this episode:

  • The Battle for Laikipia: fences, drought, and two irreconcilable logics of land
  • “You’re an immigrant, mate”: whiteness, belonging, and the myth of post-colonial Africa
  • Crimes of Survival: how climate crisis exposes colonial scars
  • Reparations begin with the soil: who gets to own Africa, and who never did
  • From Samburu to suburbia: how colonial land logic still shapes our lives
  • Botswana storytime: stolen oranges, copper theft, and crimes of survival
  • Police reports vs. the healer’s ritual: colonial law and Indigenous accountability
  • Owning the unownable: property rights vs ancestral rights in the Global South
  • Economic vs political power: when independence doesn’t mean ownership, and why land still concentrates wealth after independence
  • Climate crisis as accelerant: scarcity, violence, and who gets to survive
  • What would reparations rooted in soil (not slogans) actually look like?


🎧 Listen wherever you get your podcasts

🎥 Watch the full episode on YouTube

🔁 Share with someone thinking about land, identity, or climate justice

📬 Reflections or stories to share? Email us: rigourandflow@gmail.com

⚠️ Content note: discussion includes colonial violence, racist language, and murder/death.


Please rate, review and subscribe for weekly episodes.

Connect with us on:

  • TikTok
  • Instagram
  • LinkedIn
  • AiAi Studios
  • Roots & Rigour


This is an AiAi Studios Production

©AiAi Studios 2025


Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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3 weeks ago
1 hour 33 seconds

Rigour & Flow with Aiwan and Tamanda
Confronting FGM in Britain: “A Lifetime Sentence” | Feedwarmer 4

FGM, cultural silence, and women’s rights in Britain today.


In this feedwarmer - and our very first Rigour & Flow On The Go - we take our podcast out of the studio and into community spaces. Live from Climb25 in Leeds, Aiwan reflects on the intimacy of podcasting, how deep conversations can cut through even in a noisy public space, and the art of capturing sound in the moment. From the clang of a circus game in the background to the warmth of our signature African textile on the table, this is Rigour & Flow out in the real world.


At the centre of this episode is Dorcas, founder of Peacemaker International and Women in Safe Hands. Dorcas shares her experience as a survivor of female genital mutilation (FGM), the cultural superstitions that sustain the practice - including the belief that a newborn could be harmed by touching a woman’s clitoris - and her fight to protect other women and girls. She speaks about underfunding, being surveilled in the building her organisation carries out its work, and the “quiet sacrifices” she has made to keep her work going, from personally funding Christmas gifts for families to running culturally-sensitive food banks stocked with African produce.


We close with reflections on what Dorcas’ story reveals about women’s rights, cultural taboos, and the resilience of grassroots activists working against the odds.


In this episode:

  • FGM in the UK: why it persists, and the silence surrounding it.
  • “A lifetime sentence”: the long-term impact of female circumcision.
  • Superstition and taboo: harmful beliefs that put women at risk.
  • Survivor to campaigner: Dorcas’ journey and the founding of Peacemaker International.
  • Quiet sacrifices: personally funding food banks and Christmas presents for struggling families.
  • Grassroots struggle: underfunding, systemic racism, and the cost of advocacy.
  • Sound & intimacy: podcasting in noisy public spaces and the art of listening deeply.


🎧 Listen wherever you get your podcasts


🎥 Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/mWTOfcjwnvs 


🔁 Share with someone who needs to be in this conversation


📬 Leave us a voicenote for Season 3: https://telbee.io/channel/_lea4tltbwrlyfaymnucla/


⚠️ Content note: This episode contains discussion of female genital mutilation (FGM) and violence against women and girls (VAWG).

Please rate, review and subscribe for weekly episodes.

Connect with us on:

  • TikTok
  • Instagram
  • LinkedIn
  • AiAi Studios
  • Roots & Rigour


This is an AiAi Studios Production

©AiAi Studios 2025


Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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1 month ago
38 minutes 14 seconds

Rigour & Flow with Aiwan and Tamanda
Undocumented & Working in London: A Hidden Struggle | Feedwarmer 3

Trans rights, migrant labour, and the hidden lives of domestic workers in Britain.


In this feedwarmer, we shine a light on Our Place Is Here - a powerful three-part podcast series created in partnership with the Our Place Is Here campaign produced by Aiwan and AiAi Studios in collaboration with gal-dem. The Filipino Domestic Workers Association, and campaign partners fighting for migrant workers’ rights including Kanlungan Filipino Consortium, The Voice of Domestic Workers, Kalayaan, and Purpose. Visit gal-dem.com to read the essays in both English and Tagalog, and find out what you can do to support the campaign. 


At the centre of our conversation is Nina’s story: a trans woman navigating life as an undocumented domestic worker in the UK. Her essay, read in both English and Tagalog, unpacks the intersection of gender, migration status, and labour - revealing what it means to survive, resist, and find dignity while working behind closed doors.


We reflect on the broader campaign, the dual-language production process, and what this project teaches us about trauma-informed storytelling, the politics of translation, and the role of podcasting as a tool for research and systems change.


In this episode:

  • Living in fear of sirens: the everyday hypervigilance of undocumented migrant lives.
  • The home as a site of vulnerability & resistance in domestic work.
  • Finding agency through storytelling; how Filipino domestic workers claim their voices.
  • What academia can learn from Our Place Is Here about language, knowledge, and accessibility.
  • The politics of translation: why some words defy Tagalog equivalents - intersectional feminism, classism, racism, for example.
  • Trauma-informed storytelling and how to avoid extractive narratives.


Our Place Is Here was created with and for the community it represents - centring the voices of domestic workers themselves, in their own words.


Listen, reflect, and ask yourself: who gets to be seen, and whose labour remains invisible?


Our Place Is Here was produced by Aiwan Obinyan with production and sound design by AiAi Studios. The Executive Producers for gal-dem were Suyin Haynes, Cici Peng and Katie Goh.

The Executive Producer for the Our Place Is Here campaign was Francesca Humi, supported by the Filipino Domestic Workers Association, Kanlungan and The Voice of Domestic Workers.

With graphics produced by Karis Pierre and artwork produced by Khadija Said.



Please rate, review and subscribe for weekly episodes.

Connect with us on:

  • TikTok
  • Instagram
  • LinkedIn
  • AiAi Studios
  • Roots & Rigour


This is an AiAi Studios Production

©AiAi Studios 2025


Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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1 month ago
32 minutes 25 seconds

Rigour & Flow with Aiwan and Tamanda
What Links Queer DV, Raising Boys & Anti-Immigrant Anger?

In this final episode of Season 2, we return to our signature Unfinished Business format, bringing together the conversations that refused to be neatly stitched up.


We open with reflections on the mixed reactions to our episode on mixed race identity, which sparked far more commentary than we anticipated on social media - including a sharp intervention from the brilliant BBC 1Xtra presenter and commentator Richie Brave, who stepped in with timely analysis just as things were getting hot in the kitchen.


From there, we weave together three of the season’s most urgent themes to ask: What links queer domestic violence, the raising of boys, and the anger directed at migrants and asylum seekers?


Aiwan reflects on the silence around queer relationships in DV spaces - why they’re rarely addressed in mainstream narratives - and the frustration of being asked to speak on the issue in professional spaces when her expertise lies elsewhere. Tamanda builds on this by connecting anti-immigrant rhetoric to violence against women and girls, drawing on the recent statement by 100 women’s rights groups that challenges far-right attempts to scapegoat migrants and asylum seekers.


Along the way, we share stories from ourselves and our listeners: being caught in Millwall football crowds on matchday, facing down misogyny from schoolboys, and healing from trauma as a teacher. The through-line is patriarchy and masculinity - how harm is taught, inherited, and weaponised from the playground to the political stage.


As Season 2 closes, we carry forward the reflections of two teachers who sent us a powerful voicenote exchange: Who teaches men to harm, where are we right now, and what would it take to break the cycle?


In this episode:

  • Mixed reactions to our episode on mixed race identity
  • Why queer DV remains invisible in mainstream narratives
  • The exhaustion of lived experience testimony, and why healing is not the same as harm
  • Patriarchy, masculinity and power, from the playground to the political sphere
  • Sister Space, Southall Black Sisters & the 100 women’s rights groups statement against far-right rhetoric
  • Stories from ourselves and our listeners: Millwall football crowds, classroom misogyny, and teacher trauma
  • How much are we really rewriting gender scripts in schools today?
  • Reflections on Season 2 - what we’ve learned, and what we’re carrying into the future

Please rate, review and subscribe for weekly episodes.

Connect with us on:

  • TikTok
  • Instagram
  • LinkedIn
  • AiAi Studios
  • Roots & Rigour


This is an AiAi Studios Production

©AiAi Studios 2025


Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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1 month ago
56 minutes 23 seconds

Rigour & Flow with Aiwan and Tamanda
Sickle Cell, Queer Faith & Black Britishness - Through Your Voices

We hand the mic to you. For our first-ever community voicenote episode, we asked you, our listeners, to share what’s stayed with you so far. What you’ve disagreed with. And what you want us to explore more deeply. The result is this moving, funny, and thoughtful collection of reflections that remind us why we make this show in the first place.


From lived experiences of sickle cell and navigating Black British and other migrant identities, to the intersections of queerness and faith, your voices bring new dimensions and fresh truths to the conversation.


We are so grateful to everyone who sent in a voicenote. We received a lot more than we expected and could only feature a small selection here, but we’ll be returning to others across the season as they connect with future themes. Also, since we loved hearing from you directly: we’ve decided to keep our voicenote channel open all season long, so please keep sending your reflections, provocations, and questions as you listen.

Please rate, review and subscribe for weekly episodes.

Connect with us on:

  • TikTok
  • Instagram
  • LinkedIn
  • AiAi Studios
  • Roots & Rigour


This is an AiAi Studios Production

©AiAi Studios 2025


Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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1 month ago
1 hour 19 minutes 2 seconds

Rigour & Flow with Aiwan and Tamanda
From Tyler Henry to Satanic Panic: Guilty Pleasures in the Afterlife & Beyond

We abandon the serious stuff and dive straight into our love of all things woo-woo: near-death experiences, dodgy mediums, growing up under Satanic Panic, and the paranormal guilty pleasures that make us cry with laughter.


Tamanda sets the scene early: this is not a serious death and grief episode. Instead, it’s a confessional of the strange, terrifying, and sometimes hilarious ways we first encountered the afterlife - from her family cat “Pussy Rosa”, to the endless references to reincarnation and sangomas in her mother’s magazines.


Aiwan recalls growing up under the shadow of debunked Christian writers like Rebecca Brown and Mary K. Baxter, whose lurid books about demons terrified her as a child… and still rack up glowing Amazon reviews. Meanwhile, Tamanda confesses her loyalty to Tyler Henry, the sweating, scribbling “white boy band” medium who claims to chat with the dead.


Between the crying-laughing fits, we ask ALLLLLL the serious-unserious questions: are near-death experiences brain glitches, or proof of the great beyond? Are mediums for real, or do they just make really great TV? And is it better to chase the afterlife — or focus on the here and now?


In this episode:

  • Netflix guilty pleasures, Tyler Henry, and the medium who sweats his way to the other side
  • Pussy Rosa the cat, Nollywood demons, and the strange ways we first met death
  • Rebecca Brown, Mary K. Baxter, and the Christian books that terrified a generation (and still sell like hotcakes)
  • Why we can’t stop watching dodgy paranormal shows even when we don’t believe a word of them
  • NDEs: glitch in the brain, window to the beyond, or just our favourite binge-worthy trope?
  • Laughing our way through the fears that used to keep us up at night


🎧 Listen wherever you get your podcasts

🎥 Watch the full episode on YouTube

📲 Follow us on TikTok

🔁 Share with someone who secretly loves bad paranormal TV

Please rate, review and subscribe for weekly episodes.

Connect with us on:

  • TikTok
  • Instagram
  • LinkedIn
  • AiAi Studios
  • Roots & Rigour


This is an AiAi Studios Production

©AiAi Studios 2025


Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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2 months ago
1 hour 8 minutes 21 seconds

Rigour & Flow with Aiwan and Tamanda
Too Fat for Europe, Too Skinny for Africa? The Beauty Standards That Trap Us

We step into the tangled, deeply personal politics of body image - and the fat and skinny shaming scripts that shape how we see ourselves, each other, and the people we love.


We open with a conversation about what it means to be two women in a relationship with entirely different body types; each of us shaped by radically different cultural beauty standards in our own homes. From Lagos to London, Malawi to the Midlands, we unpack how the same body can be celebrated in one place and critiqued in another - and sometimes by the very same people!


Tamanda shares her lifelong entanglement with weight, the childhood humiliations that stuck, and how growing up in southern Africa taught her that a bigger body could be a symbol of health, wealth, and desirability. Meanwhile, Aiwan reflects on the flip side: the invisibility and dismissal that can come with being naturally slim, the “chicken bone legs” taunts of school, and why she’s had to defend the legitimacy of skinny shaming as real harm.


Along the way, we trace the food rules and body scripts we inherited: from family kitchens lined with SlimFast boxes, to the public weigh-ins of Weight Watchers, to today’s Ozempic era. We unpack how those scripts collide in our relationship, how they shape intimacy, and what it takes to stop policing each other’s bodies when the culture won’t.


In this episode:

  • Loving each other while living in very different bodies and body rules
  • Why fat and skinny shaming are two sides of the same policing coin
  • The cultural flip: how African and European standards can praise or condemn the same body
  • Family food rules and public humiliation, from SlimFast to “30 lemons a day”
  • Weight Watchers, Ozempic, and the shifting landscape of current-day diet culture
  • What it means to write new body scripts in love and in life



Please rate, review and subscribe for weekly episodes.

Connect with us on:

  • TikTok
  • Instagram
  • LinkedIn
  • AiAi Studios
  • Roots & Rigour


This is an AiAi Studios Production

©AiAi Studios 2025


Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Show more...
2 months ago
1 hour 13 minutes 27 seconds

Rigour & Flow with Aiwan and Tamanda
Are We Ever Really Grown? Generations, Adulthood & the Lie of Turning 40

We step into the messy truth about adulthood, rites of passage, and why so many of us hit 40 feeling… not quite grown.


Aiwan opens with Kendra Lindsay’s viral post - a rallying call to join the “Council of Elders” instead of clinging to youth - which ultimately ruffled the feathers of a legion of women in their 40s. From there, we dive into the uncomfortable question: Where did we get the idea that 40 isn’t old? And who exactly benefits from allowing us to believe that, at 40, we are still really youthful?


The conversation spirals into Blindboy’s take on the infantilisation of millennials - from the deregulation of children’s advertising in the 1980s, to the way nostalgia and “adult baby” culture can soothe us… while distracting us from demanding what we deserve.


Tamanda shares her own feelings about approaching a milestone age: how she carries all the responsibilities of an adult, but none of the financial security promised to us if we worked hard and played by the rules. Aiwan reflects on getting past the big 40, growing up outside of commercial youth culture, the rites of passage she did experience, and why she believes adulthood is something we should step into rather than avoid.


Together, we ask what happens when capitalism needs to keep us “forever young”, just so it can hold on to its happy and willing consumers - and what it takes to claim your place as a fully-fledged adult in a system that keeps moving the goalposts.


In this episode:

  • Are We Ever Really Grown? The truth about turning 40, rites of passage, and the “Council of Elders”
  • Blindboy on millennials, nostalgia, and how childhood marketing still shapes our adulthood
  • Tamanda on reaching 40 with responsibilities, but without the markers of security her parents’ generation had
  • Aiwan on growing up outside the commercial toy culture, and how the protectionist values of the Church set her up for stepping into adulthood
  • How selling to us has become a way of silencing our demands
  • The case for reclaiming intergenerational community and collective adulthood

Please rate, review and subscribe for weekly episodes.

Connect with us on:

  • TikTok
  • Instagram
  • LinkedIn
  • AiAi Studios
  • Roots & Rigour


This is an AiAi Studios Production

©AiAi Studios 2025


Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Show more...
2 months ago
1 hour 8 minutes 35 seconds

Rigour & Flow with Aiwan and Tamanda
Are Mixed Race People “Properly Black”?

One of the most emotionally charged and quietly policed questions in the politics of race - a question so fraught, it’s almost unsayable: Are mixed race people “properly Black”?


This time, the question’s unquestionably personal…!


This isn’t just a discussion between two Black women. It’s a conversation between two queer women in love - building a life, a business, and a podcast together - while navigating complex and sometimes uncomfortable truths about race, desire, identity, and proximity.


Tamanda shares what it meant to grow up mixed race in Botswana with a Black mother and a white British father - and the deep shame and silences that often surrounded her identity. From being told she wasn’t “properly Black” to the experience of not speaking the language of her homeland, she traces the painful dissonance between cultural belonging and bloodlines. 


Aiwan speaks with her usual candour about never imagining she’d be in a relationship with a mixed-race person. She reflects on the distrust and resentment she once held towards mixed-race people, shaped by the realities of colourism, social hierarchy, and the unspoken rules of blackness in the UK. 


Together, we explore how narratives of race shift across borders and generations, how identity is shaped by more than just skin tone, and why mixed identity is neither a bridge nor a middle ground - but its own terrain, shaped by history, pride, shame, and longing.


In this episode:

  • “You’re not properly Black”, and other wounding words that linger, even in Black-majority spaces
  • Growing up mixed in Botswana, and the loneliness of not speaking the language
  • The violence of white family members and the refusal to reckon with it
  • How the politics of proximity, the violence of colourism and the deep distrust of whiteness meant Aiwan never anticipated falling for a mixed-race woman
  • Mixed identity across borders: Botswana, South Africa, Northern Ireland, England
  • The diversity of mixed race identities and the impossibilities of pigeon-holing and fitting people into neat boxes
  • The “best of both worlds” narrative, and the violence and erasures it contains
  • Why mixed race isn’t a middle ground, and what we gain when we stop pretending it is


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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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2 months ago
1 hour 32 minutes 40 seconds

Rigour & Flow with Aiwan and Tamanda
Who does the algorithm think you are?

We’re unpacking what our algorithms say about us, whether business can cure poverty across the continent of Africa, and why women are so obsessed with true crime as a genre.


Tamanda opens with a late-night spiral about the politics of platform recommendations: what do your YouTube and Instagram feeds reveal about your identity? And are you really who you think you are? Or does the algorithm tell a different story?


Aiiwan follows with a deep dive into African economic development, reflecting on the new Dangote oil refinery in Nigeria and why some argue that business - and not Western aid - is the real key to the continent’s future.


Finally, in our segment, we wrestle with a question sparked through a recent meeting with @Duncan Barber at Audible: What explains the huge gender skew in true crime fandom, and is it possible that watching violent stories helps survivors feel safe?


This episode moves through algorithm data, development, and the darkest corners of the entertainment industry - with rambling side steps into South London in the '80s, postcolonial theory, YouTube survivalists and off-grid dwellers, and Netflix serial killers. It's warm, strange, expansive and surprising… just how we like it!


In this episode:

  • What our Instagram and YouTube algorithms say about race, gender, queerness… and, well, all of us…!
  • Why YouTube thinks Aiwan is a right-wing white man and Tamanda is a Jamaican Muslim Black womanist weight-watcher!
  • The story behind Nigeria’s first oil refinery, and what it could mean for African economic independence and sovereignty.
  • Can business cure poverty? Is trade inherently capitalist? And what does feminist economics say in response?
  • The gender politics of true crime obsession, and why trauma survivors might feel “seen” by serial killer stories.
  • Shoutouts to Magatte Wade, Ha-Joon Chang, Walter Rodney, Duncan Hamilton at Audible, Michael Berhane at POCIT and…. the Betrayal podcast. (…Yup! We really put them all in the same bullet point! And the same episode!)

Please leave a rate, review and subscribe for weekly episodes.

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  • Roots & Rigour


This is an AiAi Studios Production

©AiAi Studios 2025


Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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2 months ago
1 hour 2 minutes 10 seconds

Rigour & Flow with Aiwan and Tamanda
Black, Queer, Free: What UK Black Pride Gave Us!

We take you inside one of the most joyful, radical, and hard-won celebrations of Black queer life: UK Black Pride. As the movement gets ready to mark another year, we reflect on Aiwan’s work on the UK Black Pride Time Capsule Podcast, what it really means to come into yourself, and the very real challenges of building sustainable spaces that can hold us through every stage of becoming.


Aiwan reflects on her first encounter with UK Black Pride back in 2015, the American YouTubers who shaped her sense of queer embodiment, and how discovering Black queer community changed her life after leaving the Church. Tamanda shares her own rather intellectual coming of age, her pathway into queerness in her mid-thirties, and what it means to find belonging without ever having attended UKBP.


Together, we explore what it takes to build a Black queer movement that lasts, the unexpected role of YouTube in our sexual and emotional education, and what it means to go through a second adolecense - sex education and all - as a full blow adult! 


In this episode:

  • UK Black Pride’s twenty-year legacy, and why its existence is no small feat
  • Coming into queerness later in life, and why a “second adolescence” can be just as disorienting as the first
  • What it meant to find King Kellz, Amber’s Closet, and other queer YouTubers in Aiwan’s second coming of age
  • Leaving the Church and finding the internet, a gateway to queer joy, sex, and survival
  • Tamanda on longing, embodiment, and finding sex ed through Beck Thom’s Quintimacy and Lama Rod Owens’ teachings
  • The challenges of branding, sponsorship, and resourcing UK Black Pride and the challenge of longevity
  • What would it take to properly fund a Black queer movement for the long haul?

Please leave a rate, review and subscribe for weekly episodes.

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This is an AiAi Studios Production

©AiAi Studios 2025


Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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3 months ago
1 hour 17 minutes 53 seconds

Rigour & Flow with Aiwan and Tamanda
How Do You Raise a Boy When You Don’t Trust Men?

We dive headfirst into the contradictions and complexities of what it means to raise boys as a lesbian couple… especially when men have caused us so much harm?


Aiwan opens with a striking reflection on The Tin Men, a social media account that toes the line between thoughtful masculinity and, at times, men’s rights rhetoric. From there, she shares more about her own desire for a son, the question of if and how our son would need male role models in their life, and the impacts of growing up in a single parent home without a father figure. 


Tamanda builds on this by exploring her own ambivalence about having a son… Admittedly one rooted in a deep mistrust of men, trauma, and jokes that land a little too close to home: “Despite having the most amazing father… I’m basically a misandrist!”


Together, we unpack what happens when women and queer people are expected to raise emotionally literate boys in a system that still rewards domination, silence, and shame. From incel culture and men’s rights memes, to educational programmes for girls and boys in school and Roxy Longworth’s Behind Our Screens campaign, we ask: what are we passing on - and what’s the cost?


In this episode:

  • What if you’re too angry at men to raise a boy with love? …Tamanda on imagining life with a son, and why it fills her with dread
  • Aiwan on The Tin Men, absent fathers, and whether our boychild would really need male role models
  • What makes incel culture so seductive for some young boys
  • Feminist parenting: idealistic dream, impossible task, or both?
  • What Tamanda learned from Plan International, The Great Initiative and Fearless Futures' school-based attempts to change the narrative
  • Deep insights from the powerful youth-led Behind Our Screens campaign, including the role of online harm in shaping boys’ values and girls’ experiences
  • Reflections on a conversation with Dr Jenessa Williams who’s done powerful work to understand the attitudes of boys at the intersection of music and metoo 
  • Why healing our own father wounds and trauma from gender based violence might be part of the work.

Please leave a rate, review and subscribe for weekly episodes.

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This is an AiAi Studios Production

©AiAi Studios 2025


Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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3 months ago
1 hour 25 minutes 40 seconds

Rigour & Flow with Aiwan and Tamanda
Notes From the Margins: From Sickle Cell to Save the Children to the Word ‘Queer

In this three-part episode of Rigour & Flow, we explore how race, gender, and language shape our lives,  and how health inequities, queer histories, and identity politics often get erased.


Aiwan opens with a deep dive into sickle cell and other racialised health disparities, reflecting on her own sickle cell trait diagnosis as a child and how the UK’s most common genetic condition continues to be under-researched and underfunded. 


Tamanda traces the forgotten queer history of Save the Children’s radical founder, Eglantyne Jebb. Plus the hidden twenty-year love affair that formed the backdrop to the charity’s early vision.


And together, we grapple with a question sparked by Tamanda’s mum, and our wonderful business partner, Travis Baxter: What does the word “queer” really mean, and who gets to claim it?


This episode weaves together personal story, public health, queer history, and language politics - from ringworm and fibroids to possibilities of Save the Children’s “lavender marriage”. It's a curious, surprising, and emotionally rich ride through the margins of health, history, and identity.


In this episode:

  • Why sickle cell is still so underfundedm, and what that reveals about racial bias in healthcare. (Shout out NHS Race & Health Observatory and Sickle Cell Foundation, who released their own cogent analysis and report into this issue just weeks after we recorded the episode!)
  • From fibroids to ringworm: the difference Black representation makes in diagnosis and care.
  • Meet Eglantyne Jebb, radical founder of Save the Children, queer humanitarian, and badass rule-breaker.
  • The surprising lesbian history behind the Declaration of the Rights of the Child.
  • What “queer” means across generations, and what it means to claim or reject the word whatever your age or background.


On misnaming, identity policing, and why language still carries weight in Black and queer communities.


Please leave a rate, review and subscribe for weekly episodes.

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This is an AiAi Studios Production

©AiAi Studios 2025


Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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3 months ago
47 minutes 18 seconds

Rigour & Flow with Aiwan and Tamanda
From Paper Rounds to Pitch Decks | Childhood Dreams, Big Hustles & the Investment Dilemma

We dig into the complicated world of entrepreneurship - from childhood side hustles and early money lessons to investment readiness culture, the “cult of startups”, and what it takes to grow a business without losing yourself.


Aiwan shares how her grandma in Nigeria shaped her business mindset growing up on a council estate in London - and how visiting her Auntie Margaret’s market stall in Balham inspired her to pursue a “work for herself” path that would eventually lead to founding her creative media production company, AiAi Studios. Tamanda reflects on earning £400 a day in her early twenties, and why she still walked away from traditional career paths to build something on her own terms.


We wrestle with the big questions: Would you take a million pounds from Steven Bartlett? What if education doesn’t work - especially for Black and working class communities? Why are Black women still the least likely to get funding and investment? Can you scale a business without selling out — or burning out?


This episode is about ambition, agency, and building something real in a world that still doesn’t expect us to succeed.


In this episode:

  • Would you take £1M from Steven Bartlett? We talk trade-offs, temptation, and power.
  • Aiwan’s business mindset - from her grandma’s grind to Auntie Margaret’s market stall in Balham.
  • Tamanda on earning £400 a day in her twenties - and why she still walked away from traditional career paths.
  • Side hustles, childhood paper rounds, and the early money lessons that shaped how we work.
  • The “Black tax” and the pressure to share your earnings, even when you’re building something fragile.
  • Why education felt like a dead end - and what pushed Aiwan to start her own ventures.
  • When investment readiness starts to feel like a trap - or a cult.
  • What it takes to grow without losing yourself: perfectionism, control, delegation and all the rest.
  • Can Black women scale a business without selling out - or burning out?

Please leave a rate, review and subscribe for weekly episodes.

Connect with us on:

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  • AiAi Studios
  • Roots & Rigour


This is an AiAi Studios Production

©AiAi Studios 2025


Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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3 months ago
1 hour 13 minutes 21 seconds

Rigour & Flow with Aiwan and Tamanda
BONUS: What Happens When the Archive Doesn’t Include You?

In this bonus segment, Tamanda and Aiwan dig deeper into the existing and emerging research around LGBTQ+ domestic violence.


They reflect on the stories we don’t hear, the data that doesn’t exist or is too easily overlooked, and the ways coercive control shows up in queer relationships, from misgendering and outing to body shaming and withholding gender-affirming care.


Tamanda shares insights from Galop’s research and from scholars working to fill the gaps in how LGBTQ+ domestic abuse is understood. She references Dr James Rowlands and the CRiVA team at Durham University on coercive control in queer relationships, and Dr Roxanne Khan’s work on honour-based abuse in South Asian LGBTQ+ communities, showing how identity can become a weapon, and why support systems still fail so many.


Together, they dig into the existing evidence to ask:

  • Why are shelters and services still built around outdated gender scripts?
  • What happens when abusers weaponise race, queerness or gender identity?

And how do we learn the difference between healthy conflict and coercive control, if no one teaches us?


Please leave a rate, review and subscribe for weekly episodes.

Connect with us on:

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This is an AiAi Studios Production

©AiAi Studios 2025


Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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4 months ago
9 minutes 52 seconds

Rigour & Flow with Aiwan and Tamanda
Why Don’t We Talk About Abuse in Queer Relationships?

In this deeply personal and long-overdue episode, we unpack the silences, scripts, and systems that shape how we understand abuse, and how they fail queer people in particular.


Aiwan opens up for the first time about her experience of domestic violence in a same-sex relationship, and what made it so hard to recognise or name. 


Tamanda reflects on a coercive relationship marked by gaslighting, manipulation, and lies, including a fabricated cancer diagnosis, and how it warped her sense of reality. 


Together, they explore the red flags they missed, the stories they inherited, and why patriarchy still shapes which kinds of harm we’re taught to see… even within queer relationships.


From Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House to The Queer Ultimatum, from silence in Black and religious communities to the glaring gaps of the archive, the creative industries and the research sector, this episode makes space for stories that are too often erased or distorted, and asks what it would take to name abuse on our own terms.


In this episode:

  • Why emotional and psychological abuse often go unrecognised
  • How coercive control plays out in queer and same-sex relationships
  • Power, silence, and what stops us from speaking up, especially in minoritised communities
  • The difference between conflict and control, dysfunction and abuse
  • The role of shame, identity, and isolation in keeping people stuck
  • What research, archives, and media still get wrong about queer survivors
  • How patriarchy shows up, even in supposedly liberated relationships


For those who want to go deeper, we’re dropping a bonus episode this Thursday 10th July, diving deeper into the research, data, and structures behind queer domestic violence and coercive control.

Please leave a rate, review and subscribe for weekly episodes.

Connect with us on:

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This is an AiAi Studios Production

©AiAi Studios 2025


Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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4 months ago
1 hour 15 minutes 4 seconds

Rigour & Flow with Aiwan and Tamanda
Season 2 Begins Here | Rigour & Flow - Abuse, Silence, and Survival

⚠️ Content warning: domestic violence, emotional abuse


Some stories mark you.


Even when they’re not yours.


Even when you’re just eight years old, standing in the corner, trying not to breathe.


Even when the person on the phone says they’re dying, and you believe them - because how could someone LIE like that?


In this first episode of Season 2, we’re talking about the kinds of relationships we don’t talk about.


The ones you don’t know how to name.


The ones that break you open in slow, strange ways. Before you eventually wake up...


🎧 Full episode drops this Tuesday.

Please leave a rate, review and subscribe for weekly episodes.

Connect with us on:

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This is an AiAi Studios Production

©AiAi Studios 2025


Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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4 months ago
1 minute 1 second

Rigour & Flow with Aiwan and Tamanda

The show where business meets love, and culture meets critique. We’re Aiwan and Tamanda, two Black women with 20 years each in entertainment, research, and social justice. We’re also a married couple figuring out what it means to build a life and two businesses together.


We'll talk about the realities of running a business, making creative work that matters, and navigating research with integrity.


What You’ll Find:

  • Honest conversations on entrepreneurship, research, and creativity.
  • Unpacking the intersections of business, leadership, relationships, and identity.
  • Hot takes on media, culture, and social change.
  • Guest insights from entrepreneurs, researchers, and artists.

If you’re navigating business, love, and the messiness of life while trying to do meaningful work, you’re in the right place.

Episodes drop every Tuesday!


Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.