"All maps are wrong: maps are only as good as the terrain allows them to be. They are only good for the meantime. What happens, then, when our maps no longer have any affinity with the terrain they assumedly represent? What happens when the edges come to the middle where we live? When what was once true no longer feels so? When the furniture in the hallway is no longer recognizable? How do we respond to the ground when it no longer endorses us? What do you do when you are well and truly lost?"
Bayo Akomolafe, Host
We Will Dance with Mountains is an immersive course experience, held together by a virtual-physical community of borderland dwellers. It is a lingering at the edges, a search for new questions, an abiding in the trouble of not-knowing, a streak of smallness innervating the cumbersome largeness of modern living, and an invitation to be still…with broken others who are also learning to make sense of the thick.
W H A T I S T H I S C O U R S E A B O U T ?
At a time when old fundamentals are dissolving, and old border walls are caving in, we are suddenly faced with a wide open space we don't yet know how to handle or name. Today's many crises are the possibilities that haunt our normal - possibilities for justice that we cannot yet see. Seeing anew would take not just crafting new answers to our most intractable problems, but finding new questions - new ways of asking. Our vocation must now be to seek out questions and to come to the places where we are 'undone'. Our hope for new existential settlements depend partially on what culture does to reorganize itself in line with what the world is doing.
This iteration of We Will Dance with Mountains, tagged ‘Re/membering Home’, is about recuperation.
It is about co-nurturing practices, rituals, understandings, performances, inquiries and ways of seeing that contribute to a different politics of possibilities.
An 11-week course about decolonization, becoming indigenous and coming to edges, the course brings together people around the world, who commit to a series of intertwining practices of re/membering themselves – not in terms of trying to recover a pristine self or original identity, but in terms of reconfiguring themselves.
In a sense, this course is a sanctuary where participants work with teachers, with other participants and with allies to recover from our performances of superiority and separation, to open up new senses and response-abilities, to learn how to trust the wilds, and to learn how to live in the middle - in the midst of the fade with other earthbound critters, where we would have to know confusion, death, grief and the redemption that comes with knowing we are not alone.
If we take for granted the idea that we are not alone, that we are beings among beings, and that we are intimately entangled with a vibrant world that was supposedly mute and dead – good enough only as converted resource – what does that mean for racial matters, for modern anxieties about progress, for our concerns about social justice, for how we parent our children or educate them, for how we conceive of work or understand food, for our notions of psychological wellbeing and economic abundance, and for how we think of the next? With the thoughtful guidance of elders and midwives, this online community-to-be works through difficult conversations and undertakes decolonial exercises – practical, weird, and often challenging tasks, that disrupt our modes of becoming, and (might) open up other ways of seeing and other places of power.
At the heart of this course is writing. The course – in its third year – began as a focus on writing, but writing-as-a-recovery-of-our-entanglements-with-the-world. The focus is not to get us to be better writers (since those standards might make little sense in light of what wants to come forth) or to help us publish books. The idea is to work with writing – among other allies – to understand how we show up in the world. How we are already immersed in paradigms of responsivity that block out part of the world while opening up others. Through the length of the previous versions of the course, I have co-developed exercises such as ‘palimpsestic writing’ and ‘traces of enlivenment’ that bring us to see ourselves in sometimes startling ways.
Along with this, I must add that the course does not promise enlightenment, salvation or safe wisdoms. In fact, it does the ‘opposite’: it seeks to baptise you in the middle of things, in the mangle, where it is very often confusing, ‘en-darkening’ and strange. The course is not about saving the world or finding solutions or becoming true; these Euro-American Enlightenment concepts push aside the gasping incommensurability of the many moments we string together as one ideal, and blind us to the consideration that there is no ‘world’ as such – not in a neat sense. I believe that transformation is always modest and partial; the whole is never-not-broken. The course is thus a modest, grounded, earth-based proposal – motivated by a strong feminist neo-materialist ethos and inspired by some indigenous cosmologies – to bring us to ‘the manifold others’ that live in our blind spots, and to draft new (temporary) maps to find the ones that linger at the edges in the middle.
Is there sanctuary for the weary traveler? To this question, this course gives a fragile “yes”, and invites you to rethink that question in this manner: “where are the others with whom I can build a sanctuary?” Here. Let’s do it together. With these mundane things and the scrap heaps of electronic items that litter our waking moments. Let us – those of us at these borderlands – build an altar where a stunning silence might hold sway and instruct us in languages we don’t yet know how to speak.
C L I C K H E R E T O R E A D A S H O R T S T O R Y A B O U T T H E C O U R S E
What will we explore?
The course weaves together a tangled web of new considerations in cross-cutting fields, disciplines, bodily knowledges and indigenous wisdoms – all of which speak about a world so queer, so unexpected and so surprising that we are compelled to rethink everything we thought we knew. The course is divided into 4 tracks, 1 main stream and 3 rivulets:
With-nessing Magic: This track is the ‘becoming indigenous’ track and is dedicated to a critical participatory exploration and practice of decolonizing ourselves, reimagining our place in the world, partnering with the non-human, and reframing identity. This track is about roots, the shamanic, the mysterious, and re-storying the self as an aspect of a world
T E A C H E R S : P R O F E S S O R L E N Y S T R O B E L | P R O F E S S O R J U R G E N K R E M E R
New Activisms of the Otherwise: How do we respond to crises? Why do we often feel that innovation tends to repeat the same logic of the familiar? What if the ways we frame the problem are part of the problem? This track flows into considerations of the ways particular frames organize action – to the exclusion of other possibilities.
T E A C H E R : E V E A N N E C K E
The Preposterous Wilds: This is the main track, anchored by Bayo Akomolafe, and designed to explore expansive themes around civilizational edges, borderland matters, and the fierce promise of rethinking the world as alive.
A N C H O R & T E A C H E R : B A Y O A K O M O L A F E
These Many Colours: How do we solve racism? What if that is the ‘wrong’ questions to ask? What does it mean to think of race within the context of entangling others and porous boundaries? How do bodies become different? ‘These Many Colours’ is hard work! It explores racism and colonialism, reconfiguring them within new understandings of the agency of the world around us. This track asks uncomfortable questions. Critical to this dive are practices that help us work with anger, form supportive alliances that help us recuperate a sense of becoming-together.
T E A C H E R : I S O K E F E M I
Meet the Guest Tricksters/Teachers
E L E N I T A F E L U N A M E N DO Z A - S T R O B E L
“When I was decolonizing, I became aware of the insidious and unconscious messages I was internalizing–our ‘inferiority,’ our brownness, our need to be ‘improved and corrected’; our need to be whitened. For a while, I even bought whitening products for my face.”
Leny Strobel is Professor of American Multicultural Studies at Sonoma State University in California, and Director of the Center for Babaylan Studies. She is a scholar, author, activist, a babaylan-inspired woman and a lot more (read more about her here). As a Filipina woman who moved to the United States, Leny felt the jarring culture shock of displacement and rejection in white America. She saw herself as a “colonized person,” and has made decolonization, the restoration of Babaylan indigenous values and practices, and indigenization her life's work. [Track: With-nessing Magic]
I S O K E N D E Y A F E M I
Isoke (Izzy) Femi is a big black woman with a mixture of soft mama, fierce intelligence and a deep love for psychological integrative practices. Mother of six and grandmother of 10, she was raised in an extended black family in San Francisco in the 50’s and 60’s. She has spent more than 50 years of her life living among white middle class folks, and like them is trying to find her way to freedomland. She sings, plays, cries and fusses in response to life’s up and downs, but her deep embeddedness in depth psychology enables her to do these things with great responsibility to herself, individuals and the group.
Isoke is also co-founder and director of the Todos Institute and founding core faculty of Soul Matters. She designs transformative learning experiences for staff, interns and volunteers at Glide Memorial Church and Foundation in San Francisco, California. She co-authored No Boundaries, a manual for intercultural alliance building, and developed Leading With Soul, a curriculum for cultural leadership. For over 30 years, Isoke has worked with hundreds of groups throughout the United States, supporting them to appreciate and engage difference. In her work, Isoke draws on indigenous African concepts such as: soul force, personalism, and vitalism, as ways of engaging and integrating learning. [Track: These Many Colours]
Teacher, writer, social ecologist.
I work in transformative learning, exploring what it means to be human in the 21st century. With a special focus on nature, place and children, this work has led me into arenas with all ages. Creating an indigenous home-brew of contextual learning, dialogue, ecology in place, arts and cultures, mythology and consciousness. Being on earth, and in South Africa specifically, holds tensions and contradictions that challenge every platitude, derivative and regurgitation. It is these edges that seem worthy in finding our ancient mythic ground. In quiet, often unseen, places lurk wisps of wisdom and tendrils of depth, time and space. I’m interested in that. Over the past two decades, I cofounded the Lynedoch EcoVillage, Lynedoch Development and the Sustainability Institute. My teaching at masters’ level attempts to explore decolonising learning, ecology and spirituality, and deep transitions. This I do with Schumacher College, U.K. and Stellenbosch University in South Africa. [Track: New Activisms of the Otherwise]
J U R G E N K R E M E R
Jürgen W. Kremer, Ph.D. teaches at the Santa Rosa Junior College and is a ReVision executive editor. He also teaches part time at Sonoma State University and the Medizinische Universität Wien, Austria. He is President of the Society for the Study of Shamanism, Healing and Transformation. He is a scholar, writer, storyteller, and poet. Recently he has written about the impact of colonization, ethnoautobiography, the bear, healing and cosmology, his travels in Sápmi and various aspects of Norse mythology. He is a raven and traces his ancestry primarily to the Old Germanic peoples (with possible Sámi connections) and the Jewish people. He resides in Northern California in Wíci lo holma (Meadow Lark Woods in Wappo) or near Kabetciuwa, an ancestral Pomo place, today predominantly known as Santa Rosa, California. His ceremonial practice of radical presence and spiritual work of decolonization is anchored on a patch of land called Waltoykewel, the Nomlaki name for the area (near Red Bluff, California). He is dedicated to the recovery of indigenous mind and the practice of nurturing conversation. [Track: With-nessing Magic]
A Q&A Session with Bayo Akomolafe
What to expect
- Three months. Nine hosted sessions. Two hours each, with recordings and post-session notes available.
- One-on-one deep listening sessions with Bayo, your host.
- Specialized thematic ‘tracks’ and dedicated track days
- Indigenous action research and projects of enlivenment
- Virtual tribes and compassionate fellowshipping with co-travellers.
- Guest facilitators joining the circle as trickster provocateurs.
- Unique methodologies, such as ‘infectious writing’ and electronic libations.
- Immersive and adventurous exercises and writing prompts that will take you out of your comfort zone.
- Working with an ally: we require that participants work with an ally as part of their participation.
- Discussion forum for interacting with others, and making sense of your journeys.
- Un-certificates: Each participant works with an ally from within the course, who gifts that him or her a ‘parting gift’ – made with hands – not so much as a symbol of achievement but as a token of gratitude for the time they have shared together.
- Emergent curriculum: Nothing is fixed or final here. The collective is the more prestigious guru, and the course is flexible enough to listen to your needs and adapt to them.
Meet your host
Bayo Akomolafe is an author, speaker, and ‘walkout’ academic, globally recognized for his poetic, unconventional, counterintuitive take on global crisis, civic action and social change.
Bayo hopes to help pioneer expeditions to the frontiers, where inter-species and inter-cultural dialogue can happen. Where we meet 'earth others' halfway. His passion is to evoke an ethics of the otherwise - one that recognizes that the way we respond to crisis is part of the crisis. His greatest work is however learning to orbit his life-force, Ej, and their children, Alethea-Aanya and Kyah Jayden.
As the host of We Will Dance with Mountains, Bayo hopes to inspire expeditions to multispecies frontiers, where we meet the universe halfway. He hopes to continue the composting of the human ignited by indigenous value and the works of feminist thinkers like Barad and Haraway; and help open up other places of power - inviting a politics of surprise as an ethical response to the challenge of a polyvocal world.
Dates, times and other details
For three months, nine sessions, from September 16 to December 2, 2017 we'll join each other for live video sessions. (Those without video or internet access can join us by phone.) All sessions are recorded and permanently available for participants.
You'll have an opportunity to speak one on one with Bayo in a deep listening session of your own design.
In addition to the live sessions, we encourage you to participate in recurring track sessions of your own choosing and group discussion (on the closed group Facebook page) that will challenge you to take the next steps in decentering yourself through this experience.
Live Main Sessions are held on the following Saturdays at 7:30 pm IST (India) | 10am Eastern US | 7am Pacific | 12am AEST (Australia) | 3pm BST (London)
September 16 | September 30 | October 14 | October 21 | October 28 | November 4 | November 11 | November 18 | December 2
T E A M
I am grateful for the enchanted ecosystem of support available in this iteration of We Will Dance With Mountains. This course, in all its wealth and sensuous abundance, would not be possible without the hands, tongues, hearts and feet of the following people:
M I D W I V E S : Brenda Salgado (USA), Coumba Toure (Senegal)
C O N C H - H O L D E R S : Sayani Mantri (India), Christopher Bowers (USA)
For support on this journey
Meet Aerin
Aerin Dunford is a writer, upcycling artist, urban farmer and yoga instructor. She is an independent consultant using Art of Hosting and other participative approaches as a basis for her work with organizations.
Price and Registration
The course registration price is $400USD for the 3 month duration.
You may opt for the partial payment plan, which allows you to pay three-fourths of the full amount now ($300USD), and then the final part towards the end of the course.
Finally, there are full scholarships available but limited seats for those. The scholarship option invites you to pay nothing at all, or make a payment/donation (based on your financial ability) to any one of our partner institutions listed at the end of the site.
[In case you are wondering why these charges have been made, please see my note in the FAQ section below on 'Why pay for this?']
Frequently Asked Questions
When does the course meet?
Live Sessions are held on the following Saturdays at 7:30 pm IST (India) | 10am Eastern US | 7am Pacific | 12am AEST (Australia) | 3pm BST (London)
September 16 | September 30 | October 14 | October 21 | October 28 | November 4 | November 11 | November 18 | December 2
What technology do I need to participate?
The live sessions are held via ZOOM, a video conferencing platform. You can participate using a computer or tablet. You can also call in via phone using one of many international dial in numbers.
How much time should I expect to spend on the course?
Live sessions are two hours long, at least twice a month. Sometimes, course dates may not be bi-weekly (as is advertised with this course edition). Between those sessions you might join a small group call or 'track sessions', and you may choose to participate in the online discussion (on our closed group Facebook page). In the past, we've had participants show up quite actively and gain immense insight. Others have participated in less active ways and still enjoyed the experience. We look to you to decide how much engagement will create the experience you desire. If you commit to the course and find yourself taken away by unforeseen circumstances, we do provide recordings of each session.
What is required to receive a scholarship?
We offer a limited number of full and partial scholarships as a part of our commitment to making the course accessible to people in varying financial situations, income patterns and economic conditions. All that we ask is that you fully commit to showing up for the course - being present during sessions and adding to the experience of all participants. We do not ask for proof of financial need; we hope instead that those who come to us will honor the offer in the spirit that it is made.
Why pay for this?
In the spirit of full disclosures, and in alignment with my own emergent (and imperfect) practices of living 'in the small and in the gift', I would like to share why this course has been charged or why it is not 'free'.
It would follow from many of the things said here that this course is about other ways of being in the world. Why then does it have a price tag attached? Is this not another instance of commercializing the sacred? Why not make it free? Aren’t we all about gift paradigms and all?
It is commonplace to associate money with all that is wrong with the world. We tend to be suspicious when it comes into the mix – and for good reasons. However, in so doing, what escapes us is how we create an artificial binary that parses between gift and money, or between money and nature – as if modernity and its tools are an aberration of (and deviation from) a pure substrata of nature. I think otherwise – that even money is part of what the world is doing, and that because we are currently immersed in particular cultures of valuation (where the seeds of the next are still emerging), it is often difficult to be supported and to thrive without participating in this culture.
Moreover, ‘free-ness’ is not an absence of costs or prices as our flat, hyper-consumerist landscapes might want us to believe. I prefer to think of 'free' as a deep, underlying practice of mutuality that transcends mere transactional exchange, as well as an invitation to honest transparency. Every thing - including this course - has its genealogy and comes with its entangled stream of processes, occlusions and negotiations. 'Free' is how we respond to these histories, or how we strive to account for its emergence. In this sense of transparency, I want you to know that the costs of this course will go into paying for its setup, maintenance and ongoing support. It will also go into supporting me and my extensive family of many mothers, sisters, children and wife. This course is a creative and honest expression of my motivational and physical needs – a way I am privileged to open up space for the otherwise while being sustained in the time-consuming work that it entails. [Additional note: The scholarship project for this year's iteration of the course (2017: 'Re/membering Home') is funded entirely by Bayo Akomolafe.]
Is there a curriculum, and are certificates awarded as evidence of completion?
No. As a recovering academic, I am acutely aware of the manner in which certain modes of learning exert such a claim on our attention, that we forget there are other ways of learning. Certificates, diplomas and whatnot are aspects of a larger political-economic order that privileges a few to the exclusion of many, and grants access to abundance only by colonizing and occluding other paradigms of learning and wellbeing. I want to work for a world where my wife's breastfeeding our son or cooking or giving our daughter a bath is seen as vital economic activity. No less significant or less prestigious than what white collar industrial contexts generate. I want to work for a world where learning is not 'completed', but is playful, always partial, embodied in collective aspirations, and subversive.
Moreover, the content of this course would hardly be attractive to our industrial work contexts. What we are trying to do is cleave open in-between spaces where we can recuperate (partially) a sense of intra-dependence with others, with radicalized others, with the world around us, and with the might-have-been and yet-to-come.
So there are no certificates, but there are 'un-certificates' - which are exchanged gifts between paired participant-allies. These 'un-certificates' are tokens of our ongoing becoming-together, a symbol of porosity and stunning mutuality - instead of a formalized declaration of completion.
With regard to the curriculum, we run a fluid-structured learning format that is responsive to the emergent, spontaneous needs of participants. Instead of a cold curriculum that is about progression through topics, we have a compass of inquiries and shared adventures - a foretaste of which registered participants are furnished with. However, if you find you are only able to make a decision about participation based on the availability of the 'compass', do visit my website where a contact form is available.
Refund/Withdrawal Policy
There’s an inescapable simultaneity involved with all the actors on this course: by offering this platform, we do not only ‘touch’ you, you touch us – and other participants. It’s a mutual infection. You will come to shape the course simply by showing up, just as much as the course will shape and mark you inexorably. As such, if something does happen along the way – precluding you from continuing our relationship – understand that you cannot be replaced.
So while we have no strict ‘no-refund’ policy as other online courses do, we invite you to consider that the energies you’d have brought with you, as well as the seat you’d occupy (often to the exclusion of other potential participants) represent real stakes. Short of your personal displeasure with the content of the course and other unique cases (which we will consider deliberately if they arise) there are few occasions upon which we might easily provide refunds.