Bayo Akomolafe to deliver keynote address at COA’s 53rd Commencement

Posthumanist philosopher and poetic cultural theorist Dr. Bayo Akomolafe will present the keynote address at College of the Atlantic’s 53rd Commencement on Saturday, June 6, at 2 p.m. The event is open to members of the COA community, friends, family, and supporters.

A widely celebrated international speaker, poet, teacher, self-styled “trans-public” intellectual, essayist, and author, Akomolafe is the Hubert Humphrey Distinguished Professor of American Studies at Macalester College. He is also 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,” his bio states.

Akomolafe will be presented with an honorary Master of Philosophy in Human Ecology at the ceremony. Also receiving an honorary degree will be climate‑fiction pioneer Kim Stanley Robinson. Learn more about Commencement here.

Akomolafe is rooted with the Yoruba people in a more-than-human world, the father to Alethea Aanya and Kyah Jayden Abayomi, the grateful life-partner to EJ, son, and brother. He is the author and co-author of two books, These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home (North Atlantic Books, 2017) and We Will Tell our Own Story: The Lions of Africa Speak (Universal Write Publications LLC, 2017).

Central to 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.

Akomolafe has held many academic appointments, including the inaugural Global Senior Fellow at University of California, Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute, the inaugural W. E. B. Du Bois Scholar in Residence for Trans-public Intellectualism at the Schumacher Centre for a New Economics, the inaugural Distinguished Philosopher-in-Residence at the John Randle Centre for Yoruba Culture and History, the inaugural Scholar in Residence for the Aspen Institute, and the inaugural Special Fellow for the Council of an Uncertain Human Future at Clark University. Other fellowships have included The New Institute, Otis College of Art and Design, Case Western Reserve University, Ohio, and the UNESCO headquarters in Paris.

Akomolafe holds a PhD in clinical psychology from Covenant University in Nigeria. He is the recipient of an honorary doctorate from the California Institute of Integral Studies, the recipient of the New Thought Leadership Award, and the Excellence in Ethnocultural Psychotherapy Award by the African Mental Health Summit. In a ceremony in July 2023, the City of Portland, Maine awarded Akomolafe with the Key to the City in recognition of his planet-wide work and achievements.

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, Akomolafe 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.