Báyò Akómoláfé

Báyò Akómoláfé, PhD, rooted with the Yoruba people in a more-than-human world, is the father to Alethea Aanya and Kyah Jayden Abayomi and the grateful life-partner to EJ, as well as a son and a brother. A widely celebrated international speaker, posthumanist thinker, poet, teacher, self-styled “trans-public” intellectual, and essayist, he is the author of two books: These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home and We Will Tell Our Own Story: The Lions of Africa Speak! (with Professors Molefi Kete Asante and Augustine Nwoye). Akómoláfé 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. Akómoláfé currently lectures at Pacifica Graduate Institute in California, and was recently appointed the Hubert Humphrey Distinguished Professor of American Studies at Macalester College in Minnesota (beginning in fall 2025). He is also the inaugural Global Senior Fellow of the Othering & Belonging Institute at the University of California (Berkeley); the inaugural W. E. B. Du Bois Scholar in Residence for Trans-Public Intellectualism at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics; and the inaugural Scholar in Residence for the Aspen Institute. Akómoláfé lives between Chennai, India and Great Barrington, Massachusetts with his family. He considers Brazil to be his spiritual home.

Báyò Akómoláfé in Kosmos

The Unbehaving World

Akomolafe explores “cracks” as sacred ruptures in the architecture of modernity—sites where the world exceeds its own design and invites new forms of becoming. Rejecting doors, solutions, and behavioral frames, he gestures toward a geophilosophy of fugitivity, where instability reveals emergent possibilities beyond human exclusivity and settled assumptions.

Published in Volume 25 Issue 6

Paraphilanthropy | Giving Money its Freedom Papers

Dr. Báyò Akómoláfé explores how mainstream critiques often fall short by focusing on surface-level diversity and inclusion, rather than addressing deeper structural issues rooted in white coloniality and neurotypicality. Ultimately, he calls for a paradigm shift in philanthropy towards a more fluid, experimental, and emancipatory approach.

Published in Volume 24 Issue 3

Entangled with the World

The questions we ask trigger the entire world. They are the world examining itself. Even more, the space between a question and an answer is not empty and void. It is troubled and littered with many obstacles, many beings, and many forces we are called to engage with but often avoid in our rush for answers.

Published in Spring | Summer 2017, Volume 17 Issue 1

They Sang with a Thousand Tongues: The Poetry of Diversity

Now we can no longer abide economic structure and ideological monologue that considers our wellbeing an afterthought, our lands a lifeless mass of dirt awaiting capitalist redemption, and our cultures a cosmetic distraction from the more serious business of making more money. We cannot listen for too long to the boastings of a pixel pretending to be the entire picture.

Published in Fall | Winter 2015, Volume 15 Issue 2

The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible

Published in Spring | Summer 2014, Volume 14 Issue 2

Coming Soon

The Village Way

Practices for Belonging in a Fragmented World

For thousands of years, we lived according to the principles of village life. Then, around the 14th Century, our lives were reorganized by rulers around growth and accumulation – often at the cost of community, equity, and the living Earth. What would it mean to return to simplicity, and mutual care?

Join us for a 9-month inquiry into this question, exploring how we participate together in a time that calls us back to community, resilience, and shared life,