April 28, 2025 5:00 PM UTC
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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Bayo Akomolafe (PhD) is Chief Curator and Executive Director of The Emergence Network.
Learn morePower, like a river, is not static—it is fluid, errant, and excessive. In this session, we delve into exousiance, a term coined by Minna Salami to describe a paradigm of power that affirms the life force within every living entity and emphasizes the interconnectedness of all beings.
Rivers flow, shape landscapes, and sustain ecosystems. They have shaped civilizations, serving as cradles of culture, trade routes, and sources of spiritual significance. Across time, rivers have been sites of power struggles, symbols of freedom and migration, and spaces of ritual and renewal. Yet, in a world shaped by human-centered ways of knowing, rivers—both as physical entities and as metaphors—are often reduced to mere resources, named, owned, and controlled. How might we reimagine power, freedom, and ritual through the wisdom of rivers? How can we learn from their movement, fluidity, and resistance? What more opens up when we move away from the way rivers have been framed and understood from a perspective steeped in modernity?
Inspired by Dilip da Cunha’s book, The Invention of Rivers, which invites us to consider that “to 'see' a river as delineated by a line parsing water from land is a choice about how to see,” we offer this series of conversations as an opportunity to “see” the concepts of power, freedom and ritual through other eyes. Rivers of Becoming is a three-part interactive webinar series that brings together thought leaders, wisdom-keepers, and practitioners to offer participants potentially revelatory insights emerging from their diverse worldviews and life experiences. Hosted by advaya and ten (The Emergence Network), this series invites us to shift our perspectives, weaving together ideas and embodied practices.
Power, like a river, is not static—it is fluid, errant, and excessive. In this session, we delve into exousiance, a term coined by Minna Salami to describe a paradigm of power that affirms the life force within every living entity and emphasizes the interconnectedness of all beings. Drawing from Yoruba cosmology, where àṣẹ represents a generative and relational force, we explore how rivers embody this fluid and dynamic power. Bayo Akomolafe's reflections on rivers highlight their errant and shape-shifting nature, challenging rigid structures and inviting us to reconsider our understanding of power. By examining these perspectives, we aim to unlearn hierarchical notions of power and embrace a more relational and life-affirming approach, moving with the currents of existence rather than attempting to control them.
This conversation invites us to reimagine power as an ecosystem of relations—wild, unpredictable, and alive—encouraging a shift from domination to harmonious coexistence.
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
Learn moreMinna 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 (PhD) is Chief Curator and Executive Director of The Emergence Network.
Learn moreAuthor, lecturer, speaker, father, and rogue planet saved by the gravitational pull of his wife Ej, Bayo hopes to inspire a diffractive network of sharing within an ethos of new responsivity – a slowing down, an ethics of entanglement, an activism of inquiry, a ‘politics of surprise’. Born into a Yoruba family, Bayo graduated summa cum laude in psychology in 2006 at Covenant University (Nigeria), and then was invited to take up a lecturing position. Largely nurtured and trained in a world that increasingly fell short of his deepest desires for justice, Bayo conducted doctoral research into Yoruba indigenous healing systems as part of his inner struggle to regain a sense of rootedness to his community. He has been speaking about his experiences around the world since those moments back in 2011. Bayo understands he is on a shared decolonial journey with his family to live a small, intense life. He often refuses to share pictures of himself that do not include his wife, Ej, who is (everyone can assure you) the more interesting part of their entanglement. He is an ecstatic (and often exhausted, but grateful) father to Alethea Aanya and Kyah Jayden.