Rivers & Power

Minna Salami

Minna Salami is a Nigerian, Finnish, and Swedish feminist author and social critic currently at The New Institute. Her research focuses on Black feminist theory, contemporary African thought, and the politics of knowledge production

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Minna is the author of Can Feminism Be African? (forthcoming Harper Collins 2024) which explores key themes of African feminism; Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone (Bloomsbury 2020) which reimagines universal concepts through a black feminist framework, and The Power Book: What is it, Who Has it, and Why? The Politics of Provocation (Ivy Kids, 2019), a co-authored children’s book. She has written for the Guardian, Project Syndicate, Al Jazeera, and The Philosopher, among others, and is the founder of the multi-award-winning blog MsAfropolitan which has drawn over a million readers. Minna frequently speaks at international platforms including TEDx, Oxford University, Yale University, Oxford Union, Cambridge Union, the European Parliament, and the Singularity University at NASA. Minna’s academic background is in Political Science and Gender Studies with a specialization in feminist theory from SOAS, University of London. She sits on the council of The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the boards of The African Feminist Initiative at Pennsylvania State University, The Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of the Sahel, the Emerge network, and is an associate with Perspectiva. Her books are translated into multiple languages.

Bayo Akomolafe

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 EJ, son and brother.

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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 EJ, son and brother. A widely celebrated international speaker, posthumanist thinker, poet, teacher, self-styled ‘trans-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 (along with Professors Molefi Kete Asante and Augustine Nwoye), Bayo Akomolafe is the visionary founder of The Emergence Network, a planet-wide networking project and inquiry at the edges of the Anthropocene that seeks to convene new kinds of responsivities, sensuous solidarities, and experimental practices for a posthumanist parapolitics. He is host of the postactivist course/festival/event, ‘We Will Dance with Mountains’ and curator of Dancing with Mountains, the educational consultation. He currently lectures at Pacifica Graduate Institute, California – and, in November 2024, was appointed the Hubert Humphrey Distinguished Professor of American Studies at Macalester College, USA (beginning Fall 2025). He sits on the Board of many organizations. 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 W. E. B. Du Bois Scholar in Residence for Trans-public Intellectualism at the Schumacher Centre for a New Economics, the Inaugural Scholar in Residence for the Aspen Institute, the inaugural Special Fellow for the Council of an Uncertain Human Future, as well as Visiting Scholar to Clark University, Massachusetts, USA (2024). He has been Fellow for The New Institute in Hamburg, Germany, Visiting Critic-in-Residence for the Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles (2023), and 2025 Hildegarde and Elbert Baker Visiting Scholar in the Humanities to Case Western Reserve University, Ohio, and an Expert Consultant for the Futures Literacy section at the UNESCO headquarters, Paris. He was named Centenary Philosopher (Scots Philosophical Association) by the University of Dundee in March 2024, and has been appointed the inaugural Distinguished Philosopher-in-Residence at the J. Randle Centre for Yoruba Culture and History in Lagos, Nigeria (2025). Dr. Akomolafe graduated summa cum laude in Psychology from Covenant University (Nigeria) in 2006, becoming the first to complete his undergraduate studies with first class honours from the College of Human Development. He has a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from Covenant University in Nigeria (2014). He is the recipient of an Honorary Doctorate from the California Institute of Integral Studies (2023) and has been Commencement Speaker at two universities convocation events (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0teyqf0AAg / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lh2QmobEMFg). 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. A frequent keynote speaker and guest lecturer, Dr. Akomolafe has been taught, and has been a guest, at Harvard University (USA), Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, Canada), Schumacher College (Totnes, England), Swaraj University (India), Middlebury College (Vermont), Sonoma State University (CA, USA), Duke University (North Carolina, USA), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA), University of Massachusetts Amherst (USA), Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts (USA), Case Western Reserve University (Cleveland, Ohio, USA), Tufts University (Boston, USA), the University of Turin (Turin, Italy), among others. Central to Dr. Akomolafe’s explorations is his critically popular expression, “the times are urgent, let us slow down”, with which he attempts to frame new concepts (such as ontofugitivity, the Afrocene, iatropolitics, curapoiesis, white syncopation, ecocognitive assemblage theory, cybomarronage, postactivism and parapolitics) that reframe and renaturalize human action, agency, and responsibility in an immanent, agonistic worlding of possibilities for life-death. Drawing inspiration from Edouard Glissant, Gilles Deleuze, Gregory Bateson, Maurice Blanchot, Octavia Butler, Fernand Deligny, Chinua Achebe, and the still-ongoing adventures of the Yoruba monster-trickster and crossroads figure, Èsù, Bayo seeks to organize an always creolizing planetary, para-political process of the carnivalesque that is alive to minor gestures, open to sensorial mutiny and ontological apostasy, and committed to the formulation of new modes of encountering a more-than- human planet. Dr. Bayo Akomolafe’s work is widely published, cited, and – much to his delight – very often transmuted into song, lyrics, theatrical performances, poetry, paintings, public installations, and even a publicly accessible, quirky bench from reclaimed wood in Detroit, Michigan. He has appeared on innumerable podcasts, radio interviews, and television programs (most notably being the focus of a lengthy interview and secondary segments exploring his thought on Swiss public television, SRF); and, he has been featured in several film documentaries including the award-winning ‘Regenerar: Possible Paths on a Damaged Planet’ (2022), ‘Where We Find Ourselves’ by Darren Bender (2025), ‘Closer to Home: Voices of Hope in a Time of Crisis’ (2024), and ‘Three Black Men’ (2025), in which Bayo travels around the world in the company of two other Black public intellectuals and leaders to enunciate an end- time emancipatory vocation of blackness during perilous times. A feature documentary focused entirely on Dr. Bayo Akomolafe’s work, life, and thought is being developed, called ‘The Times are Urgent, Let Us Slow Down’. Dr. Akomolafe is a Member of the Club of Rome and an Ambassador for the Wellbeing Economy Alliance. He is currently writing is third book, ‘An Ocean of Milk: Morality, Desire, and the Monster at the Edge of the World’. www.bayoakomolafe.net www.dancingwithmountains.com www.emergencenetwork.org