Bayo Akomolafe (Ph.D.), rooted with the Yoruba people in a more-than-human world, is the father to Alethea Aanya and Kyah Jayden Abayomi, the grateful life-partner to Ije, son and brother. A widely celebrated international speaker, posthumanist thinker, poet, teacher, public intellectual, essayist, and author of two books, These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home (North Atlantic Books) and We Will Tell our Own Story: The Lions of Africa Speak, Bayo Akomolafe is the Founder of The Emergence Network, a planet-wide initiative that seeks to convene communities in new ways in response to the critical, civilizational challenges we face as a species. He is host of the postactivist course/festival/event, ‘We Will Dance with Mountains’. He currently lectures at Pacifica Graduate Institute, California. He sits on the Board of many organizations including Science and Non-Duality (US) and Ancient Futures (Australia). 

In July 2022, Dr. Akomolafe was appointed the inaugural Global Senior Fellow of University of California’s (Berkeley) Othering and Belonging Institute. He is also the inaugural Special Fellow of the Schumacher Centre for New Economics and the Inaugural Special Fellow for the Aspen Institute. He has been Fellow for The New Institute in Hamburg, Germany, and Visiting Critic-in-Residence for the Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles (2023). 

He is the recipient of an Honorary Doctorate from the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) and has been Commencement Speaker in two universities convocation events. He is also the recipient of the New Thought Leadership Award 2021 and the Excellence in Ethnocultural Psychotherapy Award by the African Mental Health Summit 2022. In a ceremony in July 2023, the City of Portland (Maine, USA) awarded Dr. Akomolafe with the symbolic ‘Key to the City’ in recognition of his planet-wide work and achievements. 

Dr. Akomolafe is a Member of the Club of Rome, a Fellow for the Royal Society of Arts in the UK, and an Ambassador for the Wellbeing Economy Alliance.

Learn more at www.bayoakomolafe.net and www.emergencenetwork.org 

meital yaniv (b. 1984, Tel-Aviv, israel) is learning how to be in a human form. they do things with words, with moving and still images, with threads, with bodies in front of bodies, with the Earth. they are a death laborer tending to a prayer for the liberation of the land of Palestine and the lands of our bodies. they keep Fires and submerge themselves in Ocean and Sea Water often. yaniv is learning to listen to the Waters, birdsongs, caretakers, and ancestors as they walk as a guest on the home and gathering place of the Cahuilla-ʔívil̃uwenetem Meytémak, Tongva-Kizh Nation, Luiseño-Payómkawichum, and Serrano-Yuhaaviatam/Maarenga'yam 

taisha paggett as in taishaciara mildred mcghee paggett. i am the continuation of Cheryl Yvone McGhee and Arveal Paggett Jr and all my relatives who’ve held me. i respectfully reside on the home and gathering lands of the Cahuilla, Tongva, Luiseño, and Serrano, colonially called Riverside, CA. i am a Black, queer, living entity. my background roots itself in dance, politico-somatic presencing, improvisation, and performative installation. words too. i think of dance, choreography, and its methodologies as something to be broken open, utilized, breathed into, and as a lens and lung through which to engage ideas, specifically when contemplating the terrain of racial trauma and the manufacture of fixed identities and positionalities. i dream of being a garden(er). i received the Foundation for Contemporary Arts’ Merce Cunningham Award in 2019 and currently chair the Department of Dance at UC Riverside as an Associate Professor. i'm here to learn new ways to meet myself, my work, the notion of creative process, and what it means to be of service, with rigor, curiosity, and care. 

bloodlines is an epic and intimate dive into the israeli apartheid regime from the perspective of an ex-israeli/ex-zionist soldier. Born into a sephardic and ashkenazi lineage of in/famous war heroes and pillars for the state of israel, meital yaniv traces their paternal family narrative from surviving the Holocaust of the second world war to migrating to Palestine and their subsequent indoctrination as zionist colonizers and defenders of the state of israel. yaniv directs our attention to the cycles of history and how genocide not only repeats but grows monstrously in the crevices of state belonging. Through a bold and radical poetics that unsettles language and definition, they foreground vulnerability while traversing the nuance of voice and inner forms of address. yaniv unravels the coordinates of belonging to write in the fissures of israeli identity. bloodlines is an invitation to contemporary israelis to unstitch the military uniform from their bodies and to reckon with their atrocities against generations of Palestinian lives and livelihoods. It is also a demand that the ongoing catastrophes in Palestine end now. With uncompromising courage and in lucid manifestation, yaniv urges israelis to join them in drowning in the wounds of their ancestors as well as the wounds they've inflicted, and in so doing, bring the state of israel and israeli identity to "a loving and caring death."

Sponsors

UCR Department of Black Study, Department of Dance, Department of Media and Cultural Studies, Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies, Crystal Baik, Health Humanities and Disability Justice Initiative, and Decolonizing Humanism (?) Initiative at the Center for Ideas and Society.