Kosmos Live

This episode of Deschooling Dialogues features Kumu Ramsay Taum who shares deep insights on Indigenous sovereignty, the colonization of Hawai‘i, the sacred meaning of Aloha, and the necessity of restoring ancestral wisdom in a consequence-blind culture. This living transmission of relational intelligence calls us to remember our responsibilities to land, lineage, and Life itself.

This dialogue with Dr. Jessica Hutchings explores the grief and resilience of Māori communities amid renewed assaults on language, culture, and land under a far-right government. Hutchings weaves insights from her dual activist heritage—Māori sovereignty and Gandhian resistance—with a call to remember ourselves as nature-beings. She shares Māori cosmology as a pathway to healing and warns against the commodification of Indigenous wisdom.

In this conversation, Bayo Akomolafe and Alnoor Ladha explore the entanglements of identity, activism, whiteness, and emergence in a time of planetary crisis. Bayo challenges the notion of human centrality, advocating for humility as ‘dis-ability’ — an epistemological opening to new ways of knowing, being, sensing and relating in the world. They discuss whiteness not as a racial category but as a terraforming project, shaping the world’s dominant systems. From the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge to the syncopation of cultural rupture, they examine how disruption invites transformation. Ultimately, they invite us to step beyond certainty, into the dance of becoming otherwise — together.

Vanessa Andreotti has more than 100 published articles and has worked extensively across sectors internationally in areas of education related to global justice, global citizenship, critical literacies, Indigenous knowledge systems and the climate and nature emergency. Vanessa is the author of Hospicing Modernity: Facing humanity’s wrongs and the implications for social activism, one of the founders of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Arts/Research Collective and one of the designers of the course Facing Human Wrongs: Climate Complexity and Relational Accountability.

Orland Bishop is co-founder and executive director of ShadeTree Multicultural Foundation, also based in LA. It is a civil society organization dedicated to creating agreements for the heart of societal development. They focus on consciousness and the healing of cultures. Orland is also the presiding priest of the Aquarian Gospel Temple, founded in 1941 in LA. It supports independent spiritual scientific research around initiation.

Zhenevere Sophia Dao is founder of the philosophy of Post-Daoism and the MogaDao practice tradition. She has been a teacher and innovator of mythosomatic practices for nearly 30 years, and writes on wide variety of spiritual, philosophical, and cultural subjects. Zhenevere is also the founder of the organization, The Transgender Necessity, a platform to help educate individuals and institutions with regard to the cultural necessity of transgender people.

In this episode, I meet with Tiokasin Ghosthorse. Tiokasin is a Lakota elder. He is the founder and host of First Voices Radio that has been running for 31 years, the first Native-only radio show in Turtle Island. He's also the founder of the Akantu Institute. He's a dear mentor, older brother, friend, ally, teacher and elder. I'm excited to have him here on this episode of Deschooling Dialogues.

I'm here with Sophie Strand, who's a dear friend, sibling, an inspiration when it comes to weaving words and worlds. She is a writer, a compost heap, a troubadour, an animist, and she's the author of the Flowering Wand, which is out now, and Madonna's Secret, which is coming out this summer. Welcome to Deschooling Dialogues.

Today we’ll meet with V, formerly Eve Ensler, the founder of V-Day, of One Billion Rising, of so many important organizations and non-organizations, movements in the space of social justice and beyond. She’s also the co-founder of City of Joy, which is a physical healing center and space in the Congo. She is the author of Vagina Monologues, The Apology, her latest book Reckoning just came out. We’re going to talk about that today and so much more.

I am your host, Alnoor Ladha.
In this episode, I meet with the late, great Gustavo Esteva. This conversation took place in February 2021, at UniTierra, the radical deschooling university set up by Gustavo in Oaxaca City, Mexico.

Jeremy Lent is author of The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning, which investigates how different cultures have made sense of the universe and how their underlying values have changed the course of history. His new book, The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe, was published in Spring 2021.

"The rise of conceptual intelligence in humans has given us exceptional powers that can be used both beneficially and destructively. However, just as we’ve seen how each of us can develop an integrative intelligence that combines our embodied experiences, humans collectively have the potential to develop a far more integrated relationship with the rest of nature."

William Ury is co-founder of Harvard’s Program on Negotiation, and one of the world’s leading experts on negotiation and mediation. He is co-author of Getting to Yes, the world’s bestselling book on negotiation, and more recently author of Getting to Yes with Yourself.

Maikwe Ludwig is a longtime advocate of Cooperative Culture and locally, self-determined solutions to climate disruption. She serves on the board of directors at the Fellowship for Intentional Community, and is the Executive Director of Commonomics USA. She writes, teaches, and organizes from her home base in Laramie, Wyoming.

Joe Brewer is a change strategist working on behalf of humanity, and also a complexity researcher, cognitive scientist, and evangelist for the field of culture design. Joe is working to bridge the vast body of scientific knowledge about cultural change with the efforts of practitioners around the world to help guide humanity toward resilience and well-being.

Author and activist Judy Wicks is co-founder of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, BALLE, and an international leader and speaker in the local living economy movement. She is former owner of the White Dog Café, acclaimed for its socially progressive and environmentally responsible business practices.

Sufi teacher Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee writes and teaches about spiritual responsibility in our present time of transition, and the emerging global consciousness of Oneness. He has also written about the feminine and the world soul, the anima mundi, and on the groundbreaking subject of spiritual ecology.

“This will be a multi-generational story, it won’t be fixed in the next five, 10, even 20 years, maybe in the next 200 years, but we have to be pioneers of consciousness, and this is something the mystic has always been. We push the frontiers of consciousness, we see what is possible within the human being, we dare to live a new story.”

Mark Gerzon is a leadership expert who convenes and facilitates conversations in high conflict areas. He has advised the U.S. Congress, the World Economic Forum, UNDP, and many others.

“…Ultimately, you will have to involve hundreds of people in your community, but I believe the right place to start once you and your co-conveners have decided to launch something is with a microcosm of the system. Because the microcosm of the system can actually look each other in the eye. They can see the other person cry or laugh. They can sit around a lunch table in groups of six…”

Alnoor Ladha is founding member and Executive Director of /The Rules (/TR), a global network of activists, organizers, designers, coders, researchers, writers and others dedicated to changing the rules that create inequality and poverty around the world.

"This current system is essentially anti-life. And we cannot go on in this way, dependent on 3% global GDP growth, and the extraction of all our resources, and taking ancient fossils from the ground to prop up a Ponzi Scheme economy.