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Ananya Dance Theatre Presents - Antaranga: Between You and Me | The O'Shaughnessy at St. Catherine University

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Ananya Dance Theatre Presents - Antaranga: Between You and Me | The O'Shaughnessy at St. Catherine University

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The O'Shaughnessy at St. Catherine University

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Ananya Dance Theatre Presents - Antaranga: Between You and Me | The O'Shaughnessy at St. Catherine University

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Agricultural Hero: Linda Black Elk | One Earth

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Ethnobotanist & Food Sovereignty Activist Linda Black Elk teaches others how to use traditional plants for medicine and nutrition to protect food sovereignty.

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I, Coronavirus: Mother, Monster, Activist

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I, Coronavirus: Mother, Monster, Activist

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If you know where you are going, if you are clear on the destination and how to get there, it may be that your clarity has fooled you into thinking you have traversed worlds when you have merely substituted familiarity and intelligibility for the uncomfortable yet transformative potential of bewilderment. Bayo Akomolafe

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Once, we supposed that by burrowing into the world, and taking things apart, we would eventually arrive at pure essences, at unbequeathed virgins hidden behind thick layered harems of dust, grime and exactitude. At the heart of the matter. When we 'arrived' there, it wasn't a holy calmness we found:

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These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to My Daughter o…

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Read 20 reviews from the world’s largest community for readers. Tackling some of the world’s most profound questions through the intimate lens of fatherhoo…

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BIPOC Plant Walk and Plant Medicine Workshop

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BIPOC Plant Walk and Plant Medicine Workshop

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With Joanna Hill and Linda Black Elk

Saturday, August 24, 2 - 5:30 pm

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2024-09 BIPOC Plant Walk and Plant Medicine Workshop, Joanna and Linda

BIPOC Plant Walk and Plant Medicine Workshop

With Joanna Hill and Linda Black Elk

Saturday, August 24, 2 - 5:30 pm

Clouds in Water Zen Center and outdoor plant walk location (to be determined)

Open to Black, Indigenous and/or People of Color only

In the first part of the workshop, Joanna will share about the Indigenous practices she has learned from her Elders, teachers and her Ojibwe culture on how to connect with nature - be it the plants, trees, flowers or anything from the land. In our Ojibwe teachings, we are taught that the Earth is a living, sovereign being full of wisdom, power, and life and that we are connected with nature. This is something we are all born with, but we forget our connection and we learn different types of conditioning that disconnect us throughout our lives. Our bodies, our spirit and our nervous system, even the cells in our bodies and all parts of us, will, when given the opportunity, remember and reclaim our ancestral connection and our soul connection. This workshop will lay a foundation that will help us to re-member. As we open that space within us to become grounded within ourselves, that energy can communicate to us in dreams, in mediation, in our daily lives and in many forms. We communicate all the time. We are not always completely aware of how we are communicating. Joanna will introduce us to plant communication. Although plant communication is different for everyone, she will share what she has learned to be helpful in the process of listening and connecting with nature and with the plants. The plants are sacred beings that offer us lessons, understandings, love, support, and much more. In many Indigenous cultures, the plants are regarded as teachers. We will have a song and guided meditation. In this space we build together with our intentions, prayer, and mediation, we will listen to what the plants want to share, or what comes forth from this space and we will have time for sharing. We will have light refreshments and tea made from a plant.

In the second part of the workshop, Linda Black Elk will take us on a plant walk and discussion about common "edible medicinals" - plants that heal us as they nourish us. "Food is Medicine" has become a really common catchphrase, but how seriously are we supposed to take it? Participants will be encouraged to taste, ask questions, and discuss recipes as they walk on the land. We will choose an outdoor location such as Wakan Tipi or Phalen Park so we can walk the beautiful trails. If the weather doesn't cooperate, we may move our discussion indoors.

Clouds in Water relies on a Gift Economics Model of resource transparency, suggested sliding scale tiers and no set fees in order to balance financial sustainability, the Buddhist practice of generosity, justice and equity. Clouds in Water is a community supported temple, relying primarily on the donations and class fees that our sangha offers. Teachers are paid a percentage of the net for all classes and retreats.

We want you to know that your attendance is valued and important, no matter how much you contribute, and that no one will be turned away for lack of funds.

Level 1: $150 (makes it possible for more people to attend who cannot afford the full amount)

Level 2: $100 (full cost)

Level 3: $45 (reduced cost)

Level 4: You choose the amount. No one is turned away due to inability to pay and teachers receive a portion of whatever you give. If you need to attend with a zero contribution, please email info@cloudsinwater.org and we will get you on the list.

Note: Anything over $100 is considered a tax-deductible donation.
Online registration ends 8/22/2024. If you wish to register after 8/22/2024. Please contact the events coordinator at info@cloudsinwater.org. Please note that you may not get an immediate response.
My name is Kiizhibaayaanimadookwe, which means Whirlwind Woman in the Ojibwe language. I am a member of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe. I grew up in Minneapolis and came from a home that embraced both Christianity and Ojibwe cultural teachings. My father's first language was Ojibwe and he remained fluent in his Native tongue throughout his life. My father was a Boarding school survivor, having been taken from his family and placed in Pipestone Boarding school in Minnesota as an effort to eradicate Native American culture. Although our family knew some of our cultural teachings and traditions, there were alot of missing pieces. After high school I wanted to learn about more of my ancestral roots and I was open to understanding the spiritual teachings in other cultures as well. I was 18 when I began to study Buddhism and I met one of my first Lakota teachers, Arlo Omaha. After my first sweat lodge (Inipi) with Arlo, I was able to identify the constellation of Pleiades completely on my own for the first time in my life. Arlo disclosed to me that I had mild dyslexia, that my brain processes information differently and that I would grow out of it soon. I found it difficult to learn from reading books and from a left-brained educational system. I learned so much from him, it helped me beyond words to understand pieces and aspects of myself that was as necessary as breathing because it helped me to connect to my body, to my heart, to my light. My journey of reclaiming my ancestral knowledge and cultural roots as a young woman began. I began participating in my Ojibwe cultural ceremonies. I attended Ojibwe language tables (learning in community the Ojibwe language), community teachings taught by various Ojibwe & Lakota Elders. An Ojibwe elder sought me out in the mid 2000's and encouraged me to fast in the traditional Ojibwe way. This is sometimes understood in the Western world as a vision quest. This elder also helped me to realize more about my gifts, which included healing gifts.

I was given the gift of being a dreamer. Dreams have been a very deep and rich source of my connection in this life. I have been guided by my dreams and also I feel at times I have touched upon revelatory and higher aspects of soul consciousness in my dreams. My dreams compelled me to want to understand myself, my family, my purpose, what I saw about plants, other places and to understand the rich symbols & uninterrupted beauty that I experienced in the night, as well as things that are very difficult to see. I didn't know I was a highly sensitive empath, with the ability to see and feel deeply and to receive information from my environment including people, animals, the land, plants and more. It was a gift that took me a long time to understand. My grandfather, Frederick Sherer (White Earth Ojibwe/ Crane Clan) was a visionary. I didn't disclose my dreams to my grandfather but he knew that I was a dreamer. When I was six years old, sitting in his living room, quietly we sat waiting for the sun to rise, no words being spoken, he said to me, I dream too. I see things too, this comes from our culture.

I have studied various forms of energetic healing throughout my life. I studied Spring Forest Qigong (Levels 1-4) from Master Chunyi Lin and Master Jim Nance. Animal Healing - Spring Forest Qigong. Harmonyum Healing, Shakti Naam Yoga, Sukshma Vyayama and Divine Spiritual Wisdom from Dr. Joseph Michael Levry. I took classes from Siri Gian Kaur on Soul Listening in New Mexico.

Working with plants is my passion and absolute joy in life. Although I have taken an 11 month herbal course last year in the Twin Cities, I acknowledge my ancestors, my culture, my Elders, and my Spiritual teachers as my teachers for the plants. I work with plants in an Indigenous way from harvesting, to listening to the plants, to healing with the help of the plants. It is my joy to share with others and to hold a safe and mindful space for people to connect with their own inner wisdom, joy, and beauty in learning about and from the plants.

Linda Black Elk is an ethnobotanist and food sovereignty activist specializing in teaching about culturally important plants and their uses as food and medicine. She is eternally grateful for the intergenerational knowledge of elders and other knowledge holders, who have shared their understandings of the world with her, and she has dedicated her life to giving back to these peoples and their communities. Linda works to build ways of thinking that will promote and protect food sovereignty, traditional plant knowledge, and environmental quality as an extension of her work as a gardener, forager, fisher, hunter, and gatherer. Linda and her family spearhead a grassroots effort to provide organic, traditional, shelf stable food and traditional Indigenous medicines to elders and others in need. Thus far, they have fed and healed thousands of people. She has written numerous articles, book chapters, and papers, and is the author of "Watoto Unyutapi", a field guide to edible wild plants of the Dakota people, which is now out of print. Linda proudly serves as the Educational Programs and Community Engagement Leader at NATIFS, a Native-led nonprofit in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She also sits on the board of Makoce Ikikcupi, a Reparative Justice project on Dakota lands in Mnisota Makoce. When she isn't teaching, Linda spends her time living in a traditional Dakota earthlodge while foraging, hiking, hunting, and fishing on the prairies, woodlands, and waters of Turtle Island with her husband and three sons, who are all members of the Oceti Sakowin - the Seven Council Fires of the Lakota.

Please note that processing fees for EFT payments are lower than credit card fees.

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2024-09 BIPOC Plant Walk and Plant Medicine Workshop, Joanna and Linda BIPOC Plant Walk and Plant Medicine Workshop With Joanna Hill and Linda Black Elk Saturday, August 24, 2 - 5:30 pm Clouds in Water Zen Center and outdoor plant walk location (to be determined) Open to Black, Indigenous and/or People of Color only In the first part of the workshop, Joanna will share about the Indigenous practices she has learned from her Elders, teachers and her Ojibwe culture on how to connect with nature - be it the plants, trees, flowers or anything from the land.

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These wilds beyond our fences : letters to my daughter on humanity’s search for home | Macalester College

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WorldCat Discovery helps people navigate their research journeys to find and get resources from Macalester College and libraries worldwide.

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Bayo Akomolafe  |  "May We Live in Interesting Times"

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Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

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The Edges in the Middle, I: Báyò Akómoláfé and john a. powell

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The root of all inequality is the process of othering - and its solution is the practice of belonging.

We all yearn for connection and community, but we live in a time when calls for further division along the well-wrought lines of religion, race, ethnicity, caste, and sexuality are pervasive. This ubiquitous yet elusive problem feeds on fears - created, inherited - of the "other." While the much-touted diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives are undeniably failing, and activists narrowly focus on specific and sometimes conflicting communities, Belonging without Othering prescribes a new approach that encourages us to turn toward one another in unprecedented and radical ways.
Purchase this book from:

As the threat of authoritarianism grows across the globe, this book makes the case that belonging without othering is the necessary, but not the inevitable, next step in our long journey toward creating truly equitable and thriving societies. The authors argue that we must build institutions, cultivate practices, and orient ourselves toward a shared future, not only to heal ourselves, but perhaps to save our planet as well. Brimming with clear guidance, sparkling insights, and specific examples and practices, Belonging without Othering is a future-oriented exploration that ushers us in a more hopeful direction.
About the authors
john a. powell is an internationally recognized expert in civil rights, structural racialization, housing, and democracy, and the Director of the Othering and Belonging Institute at University of California, Berkeley. He is a former legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Stephen Menendian is Assistant Director at the Othering and Belonging Institute, where he manages many ongoing research projects, including the Inclusiveness Index and the California Zoning Atlas.

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The root of all inequality is the process of othering - and its solution is the practice of belonging. We all yearn for connection and community, but we live in a time when calls for further division along the well-wrought lines of religion, race, ethnicity, caste, and sexuality are pervasive.

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Rewriting the “origin stories” of the Anthropocene No geology is neutral, writes Kathryn Yusoff. Tracing the color line of the Anthropocene, A Billion Bl…

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Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene

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In the midst of spiraling ecological devastation, multispecies feminist theorist Donna J. Haraway offers provocative new ways to reconfigure our relations to th

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Belonging without othering : how we save ourselves and the world | Macalester College

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WorldCat Discovery helps people navigate their research journeys to find and get resources from Macalester College and libraries worldwide.

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"Beyond a mere critique of modernity, this is a book written for us as people who struggle with the everyday manifestations of modern power. Clear, creative, and cogent, the work offers cutting-edge philosophy at the same time that it furnishes usable guidance for how to cope with the coming perils of colonialism and capitalism. It's a book for the future, yet written to meet us where we are at right now as individuals living with trauma and facing ethical dilemmas about what it means to take meaningful actions under conditions of complexity."
-Kyle Whyte, PhD, George Willis Pack Professor of Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan

"Asking the question 'What if racism, colonialism, and all other forms of toxic and contagious divisions are preventable social diseases?', Hospicing Modernity invites its reader to dare and educate themselves by undergoing a process of self-unmaking. Drawing on and moving beyond traditions of radical pedagogy, such as those inspired by Paulo Freire, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira has created a powerful tool for uncovering, undoing, and recovering from the deadly ways in which modernity also lives and dies as humans experience it subjectively."
-Denise Ferreira da Silva, PhD, professor at the University of British Columbia Social Justice Institute and author of Toward a Global Idea of Race and Unpayable Debt

"This book is rude. Like the shaman's confident cackle. Like the punch of an elder whose eyes shimmer with a secret. Like a trickster's feverish dance to a drumbeat in a time supposedly passed. And right there-my fellow modern citizen-right there, in the author's cosmological rudeness, lies her deepest medicine. Her generous gift to the need to upset the terraforming coloniality of white modernity. Navigating her rigorous work is an exercise in defamiliarizing modernity as the air we breathe, the site of our persistent illnesses, and the earthly thing that can give way to something else. It is time to gather. We can start here, together."
-Bayo Akomolafe, PhD, author of These Wilds Beyond Our Fences

"This is not an ordinary book and it may not be for everyone: it is a thought experiment that skillfully and creatively creates conditions for us to shed our arrogance and to get our proverbial shit together. The author puts it beautifully but bluntly: she lovingly does not care about 'what' you think: your delusions of ends and means and your sense of self-importance are part of the problem. The book is about the necessary expansion of our capacity for dealing with difficult and painful things, to sit in complexity and uncertainty, to show up to difficult conversations and to exist differently and, put frankly, to grow up. It does not matter if you agree or not with the premise that modernity is dying and in need of 'hospicing.' If you take it hypothetically, and engage with the exercises, you will be a more decent human being as a result of reading this book. If what the author is saying resonates, if you are ready to do this difficult work, get over yourself and read it, for the sake of the people around you, and of the planet."
-Dan McCarthy, PhD, director of the University of Waterloo Institute for Social Innovation and Resilience (WISIR)

"This is not a book to be picked up lightly. Vanessa Machado de Oliveira is carrying stories that will do things with you. Her book will change you, if you let it. There's strong medicine here, badly needed. There are clues to how we find the paths that lead to the unknown world ahead, beyond the end of the world as we know it."
-Dougald Hine, cofounder of the Dark Mountain Project and A School Called HOME

"This is a book about breaking spells. And not just the obvious kind, but the grievously impacted, deep-in-the-psyche variety. Important and powerful, Hospicing Modernity diligently tracks a complex word-modernity-through the bewildering forest of our times. . . . Vanessa Machado de Oliveira's a real storyteller, and that's a praise word where I come from. Hospicing Modernity is a troubling gift in a big cultural moment, and I'm delighted to have encountered it. It seems alive, crawling around my desk, hooting at the moon."
-Martin Shaw, PhD, author of Courting the Wild Twin

"This is an outstanding book-truly original and profoundly perceptive in its contents and arguments, and multimodal in its pedagogic approach. It examines a range of urgent philosophical issues about modernity and its deep contradictions, and the ways in which its inevitable demise might be steered toward more morally and culturally productive futures. It is a book that is not only thought provoking but also helpful in guiding genuinely worthwhile discussions."
-Fazal Rizvi, PhD, emeritus professor at the University of Melbourne and at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

"In a suite of stories, informed in part by Indigenous thinking, Machado de Oliveira ruptures certainty with the void that many Indigenous peoples have recognized for millennia, pushing the reader over the edge into mocking darkness. The reader (and the world at large) must now make a choice: does our agency lie in tentatively plaiting the gloom we're in, to make sense of our predicament and to try and grapple with it, or do we default to the brilliant intellect and its offer of comfortable certainty? Machado de Oliveira has established that we need to do the former and, with the telling of fragility, she promotes a new strength through mystery. Beware, though: this is not a book for the fainthearted. Be prepared to be confronted by the world-don't expect to have it nicely served up. The work she calls for is difficult, but ultimately it is the world that is at stake."
-Carl Mika, PhD, director of the Centre for Global Studies at the University of Waikato and author of Indigenous Education and the Metaphysics of Presence

"For Indigenous communities, the teachings that are necessary for engagement with sacred plants are very rigorous and require a lot of discipline. Informed by these teachings, this book is a call for responsibility and for collective healing, as we face the demise of the house of modernity, a house built upon delusions of separation and superiority. I invite you to read this book as a ritual that can prepare us to do the work that is necessary to interrupt the harm humanity is inflicting on itself and on the planet."
-Ninawa Huni Kui, president of the Federation of the Huni Kui Indigenous People of Acre

" Hospicing Modernity invites us to participate in a form of fieldwork that connects the very sense of who 'we' are with global legacies of harm that modernity and coloniality have wrought. It is a book of acute vision and insight, and taps into that most underused faculty we so desperately need to attend to 'the end of the world as we know it': the imagination. Through a series of thought experiments, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira compels us to truly face the enormity of planetary crises as well as the seemingly benign ways we are complicit in them. Written in a tone that directly addresses the reader through stories, metaphors, and rich imagery, this book resonates with the vitality of life itself, taking us on a transformative educational journey that inspires us to take seriously our profound interconnection to all others-past, present, and future-with whom we share this world."
-Sharon Todd, professor of education at Maynooth University, Ireland

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Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira: 9781623176242 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

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A thought-provoking guide to facing global pandemics, climate change, and other modern crises with maturity, humility, and integrity-for fans of Everything Is F*cked and Against Purity This book...

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What a rare mushroom can teach us about sustaining life on a fragile planet

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Finalist for The Next Big Idea Bookclub • Book of the Year Selection Behavioral Scientist and Greater Good Society

“This is perhaps the richest book on belonging you’ll ever read.… The inspiration one draws from every page of this book is an…

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The author travelled for two and a half months by canoe and other modes of transport down the entire length of the Mississippi River with the Mississippi. An Anthropocene River project. Reflecting on this journey, this essay revisits Catherine Brown and William Morrish's 1991 essay, The Fourth Coast: An Expedition on the Mississippi River, in

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The author travelled for two and a half months by canoe and other modes of transport down the entire length of the Mississippi River with the Mississippi. An Anthropocene River project.

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Abstract

Rupture of the Virtual is an examination of a concept of the material and the invaluable resources it offers for critical thinking today. In a multifaceted analysis, the book considers the theoretical reasons for the material's exclusion from media theory and details the military origins of computing interface technologies, such as the Head-up Display and Augmented Reality, that enhance knowledge over the material. Rupture of the Virtual insists that a renewal of the material can be central to a critique of the virtual as a cultural condition.

ISBN

ISBN-10:0-692-75828-3. ISBN-13:978-0-692-75828-1

Publisher

DeWitt Wallace Library, Macalester College

Keywords

digital humanities, new media theory, augmented reality, head-up display, virtual reality, mixed reality, military, computing history, military history, graphical user interface, GUI, see-through graphical interface, stgi, art, aesthetic, critical theory, gyro gunsight, site specific, site responsive

Disciplines

Digital Humanities

Recommended Citation

Kim, John W., "Rupture of the Virtual" (2016). Books. 1.
https://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/books/1

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Rupture of the Virtual is an examination of a concept of the material and the invaluable resources it offers for critical thinking today. In a multifaceted analysis, the book considers the theoretical reasons for the material's exclusion from media theory and details the military origins of computing interface technologies, such as the Head-up Display and Augmented Reality, that enhance knowledge over the material.

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OAPEN is based in the Netherlands, with its registered office in the National Library in The Hague.

Director: Niels Stern

Address:
OAPEN Foundation
Prins Willem-Alexanderhof 5
2595 BE The Hague

Postal address:
OAPEN Foundation
P.O. Box 90407
2509 LK The Hague

Websites:
OAPEN Home: www.oapen.org
OAPEN Library: library.oapen.org
DOAB: www.doabooks.org

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OAPEN is based in the Netherlands, with its registered office in the National Library in The Hague. Director: Niels Stern Address:OAPEN FoundationPrins Willem-Alexanderhof 52595 BE The Hague Postal address:OAPEN FoundationP.O. Box 904072509 LK The Hague Websites:OAPEN Home: www.oapen.org OAPEN Library: library.oapen.org DOAB: www.doabooks.org

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A New York Times Bestseller
A Washington Post Bestseller
A Los Angeles Times Bestseller
Named a "Best Essay Collection of the Decade" by Literary Hub
A Washington Post "2020 Holiday Gift Guide" Recommendation
A Minneapolis Star Tribune "2020 Holiday Book Recommendation"
A Book Riot "Favorite Summer Read of 2020​"
A Food Tank Reading Recommendation for Fall 2020
Updated with a new introduction from Robin Wall Kimmerer, the hardcover special edition of Braiding Sweetgrass, reissued in honor of the fortieth anniversary of Milkweed Editions, celebrates the book as an object of meaning that will last the ages. Beautifully bound with a new cover featuring an engraving by Tony Drehfal, this edition includes a bookmark ribbon, and five brilliantly colored illustrations by artist Nate Christopherson. In increasingly dark times, we honor the experience that more than 350,000 readers in North America have cherished about the book-gentle, simple, tactile, beautiful, even sacred-and offer an edition that will inspire readers to gift it again and again, spreading the word about scientific knowledge, indigenous wisdom, and the teachings of plants.

As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on "a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise" (Elizabeth Gilbert).

Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, a mother, and a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings-asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass-offer us gifts and lessons, even if we've forgotten how to hear their voices. In a rich braid of reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.

Indigenous, Nature, science, Native American, traditional ecological knowledge, Natural history, Ecology, botany, plants, essays, environment, spirituality, nonfiction, life sciences, spiritual, teaching, wisdom

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Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is the author of the New York Times bestselling collection of essays Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants.

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is the author of the New York Times bestselling collection of essays Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants.

American conceptual artist Jenny Holzer is no stranger to addressing the biggest issues of our times through art. In the...

Join Robin Wall Kimmerer at Door County Library for the Write on Door County Reads 2024.

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A New York Times Bestseller A Washington Post Bestseller A Los Angeles Times Bestseller Named a "Best Essay Collection of the Decade" by Literary Hub A Washington Post "2020 Holiday Gift Guide" Recommendation A Minneapolis Star Tribune "2020 Holiday Book Recommendation" A Book Riot "Favorite Summer Read of 2020​" A Food Tank Reading Recommendation for Fall 2020 Updated with a new introduction from Robin Wall Kimmerer, the hardcover special edition of Braiding Sweetgrass, reissued in honor of the fortieth anniversary of Milkweed Editions, celebrates the book as an object of meaning that will last the ages.

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In the MAC New Book area.

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Is Belonging Possible in A World Rooted in Othering?

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Is Belonging Possible in A World Rooted in Othering?

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Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

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Available in print or ebook.

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WorldCat Discovery helps people navigate their research journeys to find and get resources from Macalester College and libraries worldwide.

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In this conversation, Bayo talks about the crisis of mastery that we face today: white modernity and the edge of the moral field into which we must dance and play and revolt. He describes cracks as innovation; the pragmatic of the useless; the minor gestures which disrupt; and edge as a place of power. This is a conversation about carnival and bodies, on de-territorialising our senses, on emerging with reality, on relating, and on coming home.

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Twin Cities Arab Film Festival 2024 - Mizna

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As Mizna marks our 25th organizational anniversary, our 18th Twin Cities Arab Film Festival returns September 25–29, 2024 at the … Continue reading “Twin Cities Arab Film Festival 2024”

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ROSETTE By William Nour | September 20 - October 6, 2024

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ROSETTE By William Nour September 20 - October 6, 2024

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Artificial Intelligence and Our Spiritual Imagination

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Gestures in the Minor Key - Bayo Akomolafe (Emergence Network)

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The World is Not Enough with Bayo Akomolafe and Ashish Kothari

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In 2024, democracy is on the ballot, a principal story told by anxious news outlets worldwide. Yet, this focus on democracy's precarity obscures other urgent...

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Bayo Akomolafe and Willow Defebaugh in Conversation | Twenty Summers Gathering

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Today, we're thrilled to share an extraordinary new work from our Global Senior Fellow Bayo Akomolafe. In many ways, Bayo's piece defies any simple description or summary, but at its most basic, this two-part essay seeks to explore the limits of the Black Lives Matter frame in advancing justice and the possibility for reimagining identities altogether. Bayo does so by asking a number of questions, all of which have no simple answers: Are there limitations to representation, risks to becoming recognized, and troubling impasses with the project of speaking truth to power? Is representation - being given access to spaces of power and enjoying systemic privileges that come along equity - mediated by forces beyond its grammar? In naming Black lives the way we do, what is surfaced and what is lost?

By asking these questions, Bayo grasps at an entirely new premise: not just if or how Black lives matter, but how does black matter live?
Read the full essay here

This essay is about exile, refusal, and wild experimentation as viable political projects we must entertain, especially in moments when the prospects of inclusion and justice, the promise of diversity, and the logistics of equity no longer appear to be in league with our hopes for radical transformation.

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Today, we're thrilled to share an extraordinary new work from our Global Senior Fellow Bayo Akomolafe.&nbs

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About Guest Essays
Guest essays deliver ideas and points of view drawn from the author's expertise and experience. The opinions expressed represent the views of the author. They do not represent the views or opinions of the Aspen Institute or its members.
It would seem a nonsensical question to ask. Are we free? The nerve. A question unfit for polite company, perhaps.

And yet, upon this question turns entire worlds of considerations that modulate how we navigate the turmoil of our times and, perhaps more startingly, how we frame solidarity in a moment when its enactment could very well be a form of biopolitical control.

But I digress. Back to the question and, more fruitfully, to your potential response:

Of course we are, you might protest. Of course, I am!

This morning, you stood before your wardrobe and made the decision to wear the blue dress, not the green polka dot one you bought last night (forgive my glaring ignorance about appropriately contemporary fashion examples). Every second of our life, you make decisions mostly by yourself. At the shopping mall, you make intelligent choices between a dizzying array of consumer products, between Coke and Pepsi, between the conservative party and the progressive one, between 'Oppenheimer' and 'Barbie', between opening the door and slamming it shut.

To the extent that freedom is defined by the choices we are capable of making, it would seem we are free. We are as free as freedom gets.

The people of the fictional city of Omelas also knew they were free. In Ursula Le Guin's telling, Omelas was a perfect city, as happy and as perfect as any there ever was. The author even invites the reader to imagine the most promising prospects for collective settlement, and then urges the reader to rest assured that Omelas already had that.

Omelas was happy. This wasn't the fleeting happiness derived from a smorgasbord of exhausted chemical inducements. It was the philosophic kind of happiness, tethered to lasting and rigorous exploits in thought and deed, grounded in the sturdiness of their rituals. A moral heaven of sorts.

Now, you would think that in such a "good" and "free" world, no one knew about a miserable ungendered child that lived in a dark and dank basement beneath the city, its calls for aid bouncing off the cavernous walls of its recent incarceration and eternal gloom.

Much to the contrary, everyone did. In curated expeditions, the city led its citizens to the dungeons below where they were asked to look upon the child, with the caveat that if the child were offered a reassuring smile, a morsel of hope, a hand of friendship, a discardable sandwich, or worse the gift of salvation, in that same hour, the city and its citizens would die. Its numberless children would fade into grim memory. Its vast towers would crumble to the earth. Its archive of wisdom would be eaten by termites.

And so, in this gruesome tale that does not quite resolve itself along the lines of what one ought to do when faced with such a moral quandary, the citizens come face to face with freedom. Or, at the very least, what subsidizes it. The thesis of their freedom is the prosthetic of this child's unrelenting miserableness. The proposal is frightening, too overwhelming for many to take. A dish too bitter to eat. As such, many walk away from the city:

"At times one of the adolescent girls or boys who go see the child does not go home to weep or rage, does not, in fact, go home at all. Sometimes also a man or a woman much older falls silent for a day or two, then leaves home. These people go out into the street, and walk down the street alone. They keep walking, and walk straight out of the city of Omelas, through the beautiful gates. They keep walking across the farmlands of Omelas. Each one goes alone, youth or girl, man or woman. Night falls; the traveler must pass down village streets, between the houses with yellow- lit windows, and on out into the darkness of the fields. Each alone, they go west or north, towards the mountains. They go on. They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back."

They walk away from the city and from the text of the story to non-legible futures. What becomes of them is not knowable. The author ends her story, bequeathing their slumbering, despondent, but strangely emancipatory journeys across the plains of that majestic city to the title of the tale: the Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.

From the story, several scandalizing propositions spring to life like radioactive fungi at Chernobyl.

Maybe the muffin we decided to have, the career paths we decided to take, the vacation we decided to embark on, the solidarities we decided to express...maybe these decisions are indebted to undercurrents our claims to exclusivity often obscure. Maybe the city is only as free as its dungeons have marked it to be. Maybe freedom a la Bergson is an indebtedness to the opacity of relations and the conditionality of our ongoing co-becoming. Maybe freedom is a distraction.

The liberal humanist idea that we are free, unencumbered, only bound externally by meddlesome contrivances like taxes and time - and that this freedom is an inalienable gift of what it means to be human - has been an importunate ally in the crafting of modern civilization.

Perhaps a more complicated story curdles an ocean of milk, and we start to notice that it is difficult to speak of freedoms in, say, telecommunication without invoking the unspeakable horrors that Congolese children undergo to unearth the cobalt needed to make our phones function.

Perhaps without the "Tigres" of old Rio de Janeiro, the Black bodies that acted as the first latrine system of that Brazilian city, carrying faecal matter from the homes of their lords to dump sites, there would be no corporeal freedom.

And perhaps, the conscientious environmental activisms of the political left in the United States could use a descending expedition to the earthing data that suggests more than 90 percent of plastic waste is shipped to the so-called Global South - and not actually transformed into tote bags of progressivist daydreams.

In a sense, we are only as free within the creativities of larger territorial patterns and moral purviews as those assemblages allow. But those freedoms enact exclusionary dynamics and are often caught up in cycles that repeat themselves.

Today, we are shackled by our freedoms. Spoiled with choice, we are immobilized by options. We imagined that the technologies of sophisticated time would release us to be even freer people, free to explore the finer questions about life and death.

But with the proliferation of screens, our inhibitions and addictions have grown.

More roads and wider lanes did not lead to less traffic; it led to more cars. Something about our calculations fails to render the triumphalist declarations of human agency and will into what many might consider a meaningful politics that knows how to respond to climate chaos, to racialized othering, to police brutality, to the genocidal war in Gaza. Something about the ways we calculate peace has focused entirely on the occupants in the room and forgotten the room itself.

A question persisted through my childhood and early university days when I first began to blow-dry the wetness behind my academic ears.

I was a young West African kid with dreams to "change the world," like many of my peers. The problem was we felt we were less likely to do while we were slowly cooking in the hot furnaces of our many candlelit nights with no electricity.

Growing up on the streets of Lagos was an exercise in cruel optimism: we were constantly inundated with instigations to think beyond our limitations, to strive for more, to think outside the box, to become great, to be the next Mandela (glibly avoiding the part where he had to go to prison). All the while, we were flooded with televised and fictionalized images of the heavenly Global North where trains arrived on time, where discarded Coca-Cola cans were transported to an undisclosed emerald city and alchemically rearranged as tote bags and personal computers, and where there were more roads than potholes.

I learned more about American presidents than I did about their Nigerian counterparts. Our sociology classes introduced us to Auguste Comte, who assured us lesser folk that there was a universal continuum of civilizational development, and that the West had undergone those stern, hardwired laws of collective growth long before us. Somewhere down the straight and narrow line of time, Comte said, we were next, if we didn't mess things up. I don't remember his thoughts about the transatlantic slave trade.

At church, the haunting question grew more villainous when our pastors told us from the corners of their mouths that we were descended from Ham, the cursed son of Noah. It was probably the reason why things worked in Europe and not in Africa. And then I went to a private university that promised to liberate "the Black Man" by becoming the exception to the rules that governed higher education globally, but it did this by seeking to join the Times Higher Education ranking system - a gesture that seemed to trouble its vaunted goals.

The architecture of my earliest training taught me to cower before the unvarnished might of Euro-American civilization and the prominence of white modernity. There, in the depths of my mind, the question churned and wiggled like a worm aerating its loam, carving my hopes, shaping my expectations, exhaling with me when the power went out for the umpteenth time in one day.
The question?
How do we catch up?

What's the secret sauce to clean roads, mercurial skyscrapers, and urban utopias? Why did we sing "Come and see American wonder, come and see American wonder!" anytime Chuck Norris flipped two Jeeps with a roundhouse kick? What was so alluring about watching it snow on Cartoon Network, and bemoaning the loss of our stolen Christmas stockings?

How do we account for the global dominance of white society?

There are theories. We've talked about most of them already: from the fierce critique of Walter Rodney's "How Europe Underdeveloped Africa" and the seminal scholarship of Black authors on intergenerational trauma to Native American stories about "wetiko" spirits that cannibalize worlds in their greed and leave misery in their wake.

What we haven't really talked about...what never really crossed my childish mind as I stared wide-eyed at the blazing guns and flags of the grander world, wondering how it came to be... is the potato.

We are so used to thinking about our world as resolutely and categorically human that our analyses often erase the ways we are shaped, moved, altered, infused, engineered, permeated, infected, and recreated by the more-than-human world in and around us. We suppose the world turns on what we do, and so our theories of change begin with us, with the individual, preferably enlightened, who must reflect long enough and critically enough to move the world beneath us.

Quite suitably, Nigerian author Chinua Achebe reminds us that we do not stand upon the earth to move it; instead, we are of the earth, and we move at its own pace. We move at the pace of germs and lichens; at the pace of brittle stars and fungal dispersals; at the pace of textured walls and purring printers; at the pace of archetypes and lingering ancestral temporalities; at the pace of slave ships and whirling whips; at the pace of hidden algorithms and corporate calculations. We move in webs of becoming, in unimpeachably relational flows and densities. We move in lowercase, even though its hard to notice that through the gilded windows of the uppercase.

And, as the late historian William McNeill reminds us, we move at the pace of potatoes too. Indeed, the story of Europe's rapid industrialization and rise as a civilizational project is more likely due to inbound potatoes shipped in from the Andes by 16 th century Spanish galleons during a time of decline and death.

Gwynn Guilford calls potatoes "the secret to Europe's success" and writes that, "it's often assumed that Europe's rise resulted from the Industrial Revolution and, to a lesser extent, the leap in scientific farming known as the Agricultural Revolution. However, Europe's surprising revival predates both-and the potato has much to do with that."

The uber-nutritious tubers - with their easily removable robes and economic value - weren't an easy sell at first when they first arrived ashore. But then people caught on to their seductive properties. "Potatoes were a far better energy source than Europe's existing staples, yielding between two and four times more calories per acre." The potato grew so successful in its colonizing of Europe that "Frederick the Great of Prussia ordered his government to distribute free seed potatoes and planting instructions throughout his kingdom", while "Marie Antoinette once sported a potato-flower headdress at a court ball to extol the tuber's virtues." Guilford writes further:

"With Europe's food supply suddenly more abundant, nutritious, and secure, peasants lived longer and had bigger families. The population leapt from 126 million in 1750 to 300 million by 1900 (and that's not counting mass emigration). When the population grew bigger than the number needed to toil in the fields, this time peasants didn't die of mass starvation. They simply moved to the cities. The potato accounts for around a quarter of the population growth and as much as a third of increased urbanization between 1700 and 1900, according to an by Qian and Nunn."

McNeill argues that "...without potatoes, Germany could not have become the leading industrial and military power of Europe after 1848, and...Russia could not have loomed so threateningly on Germany's eastern border after 1891." But what's all the ruckus about potatoes?

Potatoes signal the inadequacy of our attempts to name the world after ourselves. Potatoes intervene in our many projects to reduce the rise of industrialization to human leadership, the sprawl of colonial capture to human "evil", and the forcefully worldly events beating against the flattening regime of whiteness to "problems we can solve if only we gave it some thought and some funding." Whiteness can no longer be computed as "white people"; whiteness is also potatoes, Spanish galleons, Andean agricultural wizardry, Black capture, and the morality of solutionism. Whiteness is an arrangement.

Whiteness is freedom.

And those candlelit nights when I envied the roaring machinic freedom of the West, I never could have considered that our collective desires to catch up had enlisted us in a painful cycle of incarceration that has driven us to dangerous ecological precipices.

If freedom is not a property we have, some Augustinian quality in our breasts, but a material, creative arrangement of bodies within conditions that forecloses other possibilities of being with others and the world, then how are we beholden to patterns that repeat themselves despite our claims to unbridled will? How is it that even in the face of overwhelming data, we are unable to turn away from our most peculiar traditions and rituals? How is it that our difference-making enterprises mostly serve up the same epigenetic algorithms?

What do we do when freedom gets in the way of different differences?

This is not an easy question to ask. It is an even more difficult one to answer - which is the reason why I will not be answering it. Instead, I hope to exploit that other mode of responding to a question that does not depend so strenuously on resolutions and conclusions. This other way? Bewilderment.
[This is part one of a two part essay. Read part two here.]
About AGLN Scholars-in-Residence
AGLN Scholars-in-Residence are an Aspen Global Leadership Network (AGLN) experiment to widen our aperture and bring in global perspectives on humanity's greatest challenges. We're thrilled to have Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick and Báyò Akómoláfé as inaugural Scholars-in-Residence serving in this role. They will offer virtual engagements, writings, assist with curriculum development, as appropriate, in partnership with the Aspen Institute's Office of Curriculum and Moderators, and more.

The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, Ursula K. Le Guin (1973)

The global dominance of white people is thanks to the potato. https://qz.com/quartzy/1148452/potato2

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Are We Free? On Freedom, Potatoes, and a Third Way Politics in Turbulent Times (Part One)

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Is freedom truly ours, or is it a delicate balance tethered to unseen forces?

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What climate collapse asks of us * Writings - Bayo Akomolafe

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In this (very, very) long essay, Bayo Akomolafe investigates the work and contributions of "postactivism" in our unique times by thinking about the nature of science and its products, what we call climate change, the myriad organizations we invent to frame the phenomenon, and the bricolage of capacities and response-abilities that emerges from realizing that climate collapse is not a problem to be solved, but a barely-heard invitation to die well and fail creatively.

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Leadership as gift • Writings – Bayo Akomolafe

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Leading is not about taking unilateral action – leading is not even about being the first, or being certain, or being influential, or being knowledgeable.

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What Simon Said • Writings – Bayo Akomolafe

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The Secretary of the UNFCCC did not address the right audience when he declared that the world - as we know it - is ending.

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Anthropy / Entropy • Writings – Bayo Akomolafe

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Could happily-ever-afters be getting in the way of something more exquisite than a good ending?

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Inspired by the idea of slow curation, we ask how we may stretch our collective attention span, to create and inhabit an extended flow of compassion, creativity and curiosity, of belonging in this time of global turmoil.