Curators:
Our hope for new landscapes will not lie in the centre of the circle to which everyone has turned, but beyond its circumference – at the edges.
Our curators make up the core team of The Emergence Network. We are tricksters of the edges! We are passionate about projects and initiatives that make visible what is occluded, invite new stories about our place in the nonhuman world, and re-describe agency in terms of entanglements. For us, what is urgent is not simply about finding solutions to our crises, but finding new questions to ask about our frameworks for making sense of those crises. We come from around the world, and work with curators (potentially you!) locally to co-enact projects that open up other places of power.
Bayo Akomolafe
Chief Curator
Bayo Akomolafe (Ph.D.) is Chief Curator and Executive Director of The Emergence Network. Author, 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.
Sergio Beltrán Arruti
Curator
Sergio Beltrán Arruti – better known as Yeyo – was born and raised in México City. He moved to Oaxaca in 1997 to support and learn from indigenous communities. Sergio is Co-founder of Universidad de la Tierra en Oaxaca (Unitierra) and Herramientas para el Buen Vivir, AC. Through his work in the non-profit sector he has developed a deep respect for the capacity people have to make a good life (buen vivir) for themselves when they are able to freely take responsibility for their own communities.
He studied and walked out from Latin American Studies at Mexico’s national university, UNAM. From 2004 to 2005 he was a grantee of the UNESCO program Search and Research.
In 2010 he was part of the pioneering team of the Art of Hosting Meaningful Conversations in Spanish, and has hosted and organized multiple intercultural encounters around the world using these tools for dialogue.
He joined TEN, deeply inspired by its vision, as a co-curator of Sanktuaree.
Toni Spencer
Curator
Toni grew up by the River Thames, lives by the River Dart and has spent much of her adult life meandering through the shadows longing for the other/wise. These days she creates spaces where grit, grief, messiness, and laughter are welcome, where innovation and wisdom can emerge, and essential un-learning can happen.
When not with her Emergence Network family, current collaborations include developing practices and possibilities of ‘Deep Adaptation’, alongside her ongoing one-to-one mentoring work and personal inquiry in to how to belong in a fractured world. She is a course mentor, trainer and teacher for Call of The Wild with Wildwise /Schumacher College including grief tending, deep ecology and embodiment.
Recently, following her instinct for the margins, mischief and the magical, Toni initiated the pause as part of Extinction Rebellion: an invitation to bear witness and to lean in to the liminal in the midst of action: part of an ongoing inquiry in to ‘A Politics of Wonder’.
She has an Action Research based MSc in Responsibility and Business Practice and has trained in a diverse range of awakening practices, creativity and facilitation modalities, alongside many years of dancing, wild food foraging and ‘living life as inquiry’.
As a lecturer and course leader Toni has taught on the faculty of Schumacher College (Educational Practice; Sacred Activism; Ecological Facilitation as Leadership), and at Goldsmiths, University of London (Eco Design), and as a participatory artist and facilitator with Encounters Arts, Embercombe, the Transition movement, St Ethelburgas and others. She is an emerging poet, and has taken ‘The Work That Reconnects’ to activist communities at Occupy London and elsewhere.
Toni's work engages with different ways of knowing, kinship with that which we usually exclude and a love for beauty in the intimate.
She is a Trustee at ProcessworkUK.
www.tonispencer.co.uk
thepause@ExR
Aerin Dunford
Chief Basketweaver
Aerin Dunford is a writer, upcycling artist, urban gardener and yoga instructor. She is an independent consultant at Coquixa Consultores using El Arte del Liderazgo Participativo and other participative approaches as a basis for her work with organizations and groups of all kinds. Aerin is the Chief Basketweaver at The Emergence Network, a translocal community of postactivists posing questions such as: what if the way we respond to the crisis is part of the crisis? Since the death and stillbirth of her son, Rafael, in 2018, Aerin has been called to work with grief in new ways; she has been reflecting, writing and convening others to metabolize loss together. You can read some of her reflections on her blog, In the Name of Rafa.
Geci Karuri-Sebina
Curator
I think of myself as being on journey whose destination I keep re-discovering as I go along. “I don’t think today what I thought yesterday; I wonder if I will think tomorrow what I think today”… is becoming a bit of a way of life for me. It both excites and deeply unsettles me.
Functionally - I am currently a Johannesburg-based scholar-practitioner who has mainly worked on urban studies and governance issues. I came from a tech background (computer science) and was inspired and mentored into more societal and built-up issues in my academic course.
On the “official” front – in addition to my emerging role as part of TEN, I am currently an Associate with South African Cities Network, a Visiting Research Fellow with the Wits School of Governance, and National Organiser of the Civic Tech Innovation Network in South Africa. My experience has spanned a range of development foresight, policy, innovation and practice topics, particularly relating to cities and local systems.
Nuno Da Silva
Curator
A "recovered" Economist, I’ve been exploring emergent practices life and the living process that permeates all organisms. I design, host and teach collaborative, participatory, experiential approaches to learning as much as unlearning. As an explorer of embodied practices to deal with living processes, my work is an intricate mesh of Social Reflective Practice guided by Allan Kaplan and Sue Davidoff, The Work That Reconnects of Joanna Macy, Deep Ecology, Theory U from Otto Scharmer, Process Work from Arnold and Amy Mindell, Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire and Theatre of the Oppressed by Augusto Boal, the Art of Hosting Conversations that Matter, Deep Democracy, Sociocracy 3.0, Dragon Dreaming, the Transition Movement, Permaculture and Regenerative Cultures. I like to build bridges between ideas, practices, places, people and the otherwise, centers and peripheries and I’ve been experimenting working without a job description for some time now. After having worked in four continents, I’m currently living in Faro, in the South of Portugal with my twin boys Martim and Tomé. With them I practice the art of being placed and finding home, overcoming my fear of routines and embracing the tensions of being located. Together, we aspire to live in community and be part of regenerative nature based experiments.
Jiordi Rosales
Curator
Jiordi is one who dedicates himself to the life-giving act of curiosity. He believes in questions as living entities – as teachers who by their indeterminant nature, invite us deeper into/out to ourselves. He has a great faith in circles, in the technology of friendship and the generosity of the human spirit – which has taught him to see liberation as a communal gesture, an ever-unfolding process of disarming ourselves to one another and to the intimacy of the earth.
Though always returning home to attend to land in the coastal hills of Northern California, Jiordi’s questions continue to lead him to veiled and strangely-scented places, both in society and around the world. In service to cultural resiliency, interracial/generational-healing, community-across-difference and mentorship-based education, his work renews each summer with Unangan (Aleut) tribes in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska, where he mentors youth through the crafting of ancient Aleutian skin-kayaks (iqyan). As half-Mexican, half-Romani-Jew, Jiordi is drawn to the space between things, to meeting-places and shape-shifters. He adores what doesn’t quite fit, and in its awkwardness tears open the map to include something other/wise and ‘impossible’. Unexpected guests are welcome so long as they are willing to play. He is fascinated by questions of gender and race, belonging and failing, kairos and chronos, feminist-matterings and watery-bodies.
Alongside his involvement with TEN, Jiordi is a researcher for the Flow Partnership, and finishing an MA in Ecology and Spirituality at the University of Wales/Schumacher. He is currently writing his thesis via Palestine and Israel on the structure of boundaries, time, and the queering of state-borders; how these lines manifest on the land and in the body; how the politics we are born into occupy and shape us; and ultimately, what it is to touch the masks we wear and find new ways of crossing borders.
Karen Leu
Chief Custodian of Administration and Technology
Karen Leu likes spreadsheets and questions and stands by the incontrovertible fact that Taiwan has the best food in the world. She hates extreme wealth inequality, reactivity, and writing her own bios.
Suelen Brito
Curator
Born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1985, Suélen Brito has an art degree from the Escolas de Belas Artes da UFRJ and currently works as visual artist, art educator, cultural producer and social activist. Suélen also has a postgraduate degree in Cultural Management from the Centro Universitário SENAC. She has focused her skills as artist to help change realities in urban areas of high social vulnerability such as Complexo de Favelas da Maré, on the north side of Rio de Janeiro, where she was born and has lived during most of her life.
Suélen coordinates the Escola de Cinema Olhares da Maré - ECOM (Visions of Maré Cinema School), a project developed with children, young people and local women for creating new audio-visual narratives within the community networks of the neighborhood (Redes da Maré). She has been involved with the Redes de Maré since the project’s founding as a student, staff member, art educator and project coordinator.
She is also a partner in the Laboratório Experimental de Artes Visuais de Favela (Experimental Laboratory of Visual Arts in Favelas) which reflects life experiences in the area of informal education, especially in the Maré slum. This partnership has provided Suélen with the opportunity to co-create intense and innovative processes of transversal art education. Within the Laboratório, learning grows from the experiences, narratives and desires of each participant, planted and cultivated collectively within the context of the community. Suélen believes that each person is a potential seed and when we see ourselves as part of a whole, our local culture and memories can catalyze social transformation.
Bhupender Sharma
The Town Crier
Speaking right from the center of my being, I will say that sometimes I wander, sometimes I look, sometimes I accompany… always in the land of polarity and contradictions, hopes and fear... so much so that I stop looking and rest in a moment to look again at the human condition. My name is Bhupender. Many people call me Bhuppi. What I have written above might not make much sense. But without it the rest won't be complete. It took me a long time to meet my innate being and understand and accept it. I am a little naive and simple. I want to have a sense of humour that is actually humorous. Writing self-introductions is hard.
Giselle Paulino
Curator
I was born in Brazil and I received two gifts early in life that shaped my existence: a very brave mother who broke through boundaries of her generation to become a medical doctor, and my godparents. While the dedicated Doctor would take care of people in need, my godparents spent many nights awake looking after me. My godfather was the best storyteller I have ever met. He had an amazing imagination and creativity and described fantastic occurrences, magical places and heroes. My godfather deeply influenced my curiosity about other cultures, adventures and journeys around the world. One of the reasons I became journalist was because of my godfather’s creativity, as well as my mom, with her sense of caring for others.
I dream about writing stories of inspiring people who take care of nature and animals, dedicating their lives to social justice. Weaving between NGOs and the main Brazilian newspapers and magazines, I've had the chance to work in the Amazon covering issues of deforestation and community empowerment. I have also spent time traveling in places such as India, Thailand, Bhutan, Namibia, Madagascar and Ethiopia. I was always searching for good, strong stories. I am always fascinated by meeting and interviewing amazing people around the world.
One of the themes that most touches my heart is the quest to find a sustainable system of producing fair and healthy food. I started a new journey as researcher at the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro and have been in Ethiopia a few times, investigating a project to mitigate hunger in partnership with the Brazilian government. I have also spent precious time in rural areas of Mozambique. In the last years, I have been taking groups on learning journeys in countries such as India, Bhutan and Brazil. My goal is to create learning spaces where communities from Brazil, from Africa and from Asia can meet to exchange experiences, learn from each other and create new systems of life.
The Earthworms:
The Earthworms are our wisdom keepers and serve as the Board of The Emergence Network.
Annie Levin
Earthworm
Annie Levin is an attorney/doula/pollinator living in Brooklyn, NY. A graduate of Harvard Law School also trained in mediation, psychology, permaculture design, and women’s physiology & health, she believes that the complex problems facing our world require creative, cross-disciplinary solutions. She brings her varied skills and experiences to projects focused on creating a more just, healthy, and sustainable world.
Currently, Annie serves as a curator for The Emergence Network (TEN), a collective looking to address the question, “What if the way we respond to the crisis is part of the crisis?” As part of her work with TEN she hostsPrecipice, a monthly show on Voice America’s Revolutionary Wellness Talk Radio channel. She is also an apprentice herbalist with Robin Rose Bennett, and a scholar at Stephen Jenkinson’s Orphan Wisdom School.
Previously, Annie was a Staff Attorney at Catholic Charities Community Services in New York, where she represented Unaccompanied Immigrant Children before the Executive Office of Immigration Review. She also served as the Director of Mediation Services at the Center for Conflict Resolution in Chicago, where she trained mediators and supervised approximately two thousand mediations annually. She was a Doula in the Teen Parent and Infant Development Services program at Christopher House in Chicago, providing childbirth support and advocacy for teen parents, as well as a Literacy Teacher/Community Organizer in the Public Allies Americorps program. She has worked with the American Civil Liberties Union, the Senate Judiciary Committee, and the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project.
Gaby Franco
Earthworm
I consider myself as a mid-wife of new possibilities.
I am Mexican. Originally trained as an economist and later on reformed as a holistic scientist in Schumacher College. I have also been explored deeply Ayurveda, Yoga Therapy, Permaculture and Regenerative Design.
I am passionate about “seeing with new eyes” and understanding how we can activate our potential individually and collectively; I design processes that can allow us to develop it generating greater wellbeing for all.
I have been collaborating with organizations worldwide, from Bhutan all the way to Mexico facilitating processes that re-connect us to our humanness and our will so that we can engage the emergent world from our unique essence while activating our individual and collective agency.
I started my professional career in the corporate world as a Brand Manager at Procter and Gamble, then continued leading Corporate Sustainability initiatives at HSBC until I walked out from that world and transitioned into diverse NGO’s/Foundations like the Gross National Happiness Centre in Bhutan, the International Committee of the Red Cross, Save the Children, The Hunger Project, Giftival and several indigenous communities in Mexico.
I joined TEN, deeply inspired by its vision as a co-curator of Sanktuaree.
Ijeoma Clement Akomolafe
Earthworm
Ijeoma Clement Akomolafe is a widely cited author, speaker, lecturer, biotechnological researcher and teacher, whose work has involved seeking indigenous alternatives to the treatment of malaria. She has advanced degrees from Women’s Christian College, Chennai and Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore, India. She is Chief Coordinator of Broken Compass – an unschooling project that seeks to weave intergenerational ties between parents and children, in playful, adventurous contexts of co-learning and mutual exploration. Together with Bayo Akomolafe, she co-founded The Emergence Network as a project to invite other modes of responding to crisis. As an educator Ijeoma left the university to live a life of intense smallness and intimacy with her growing family. She is committed to mothering her two children, Alethea Aanya and Kyah Jayden, and is trying to figure out what a decolonized learning journey might look like not only for her family of four, but her community in Chennai.
Alnoor Ladha
Earthworm
Alnoor Ladha is a founding member and the 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.
He is a Board Member of Greenpeace International USA and a visiting lecturer at New York University (NYU), Columbia University and the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD). Alnoor holds an MSc in Philosophy and Public Policy from the London School of Economics. Alnoor’s daily practice involves deep immersion into cosmic entanglement (knowing his activist work is a spritual practice and vice versa) and constant disruption (he’s a nomad, training himself for the post-capitalist world…at least that’s what he tells himself). He is an unreconstructed utopian, Gaia-worshiper, star gazer, systems thinker and meme-warrior.
Eric Chisler
Earthworm
Eric Chisler lives in the Oak woodlands of Northern California near the banks of the Sacramento River in the homeland of the Mechoopda people. After several years of liminality—hitchhiking, community building, and environmental activism—he has settled back into his natural academic environment at the local university. A scholar, poet, and cultural activist, Eric considers himself a citizen of his place and time in dominant culture North America and labors at the challenges of living at the edge of its terror: belonging to place, revealing and healing ancestral trauma, and initiating the cultural intelligence necessary for village life.
Manish Jain
Earthworm
Manish Jain is deeply committed to creating new models of unlearning for the 21st century in order to regenerate our diverse knowledge systems, free our cultural imaginations and expand our consciousness. He has served for the past 19 years as Co-Founder of Shikshantar: The Peoples’ Institute for Rethinking Education and Development based in Udaipur, India and has worked intensively with children, youth and grassroots communities. He is co-founder of the Swaraj University which is India’s first self-designed learning university dedicated to regeneration of local culture, local economy and local ecology. He is also a co-founder of the Learning Societies Network and has pioneered the Learning Societies Unconference in India.
Manish is a co-creator of the Udaipur as a Learning City process which is dedicated to regenerating the grassroots learning ecosystem through community expressions and dialogue, sustainability and gift culture. He is Chief Editor of the magazine, Swapathgami (Making Our Own Paths of Living and Learning) for the Walkouts-Walkons Network. He has edited several books on Vimukt Shiksha (liberating learning) on themes such as learning societies, unlearning, gift culture, community media, and tools for deep dialogue. Manish has served as guest faculty for Schumacher College, National School of Drama Theatre in Education (India) and for the Peace Boat (Japan). Manish also served as a long-time board member with the Berkana Institute (USA) and was a co-founder of the Berkana Exchange for trans-local community leadership centers. He is a facilitator and designer with the Art of Hosting network and has 12+ years of experience with World Cafe, Open Space Technology and Circle methodologies. He is Trustee with the Slow Food India network. He is an advisory member of the Economics of Happiness network for localization. He recently helped to initiate the Ecoversities Global Alliance and the Giftival Friends Network. He serves as special advisor for Roller Strategies using the social lab methodology and has worked on the facilitation team for Grove 3547 in Chicago.
Having worked as one of the principal developers of the UNESCO “Learning without Frontiers” global initiative and as a consultant in the areas of educational planning, policy analysis, research, program design and media/technology with UNICEF, USAID, UNDP, World Bank, Academy for Educational Development, and the Education Development Center in Africa, South Asia and the former Soviet Union, Manish has been trying to unlearn his Master’s degree in Education (from Harvard University and a B.A. in Economics, International Development and Political Philosophy from Brown University). He and his wife Vidhi have been unschooling themselves with their 15 year old daughter, Kanku.
James Redenbaugh
Earthworm
Born in ’89, I’ve grown up alongside the world of digital technology and design innovation we now live in. From a young age I’ve maintained an intimate relationship with cutting edge technologies, particularly design programs and web systems. Today, I put my life-long learning to use in creating innovative websites, brands, digital solutions, and graphic experiences.
I see design as a way of life, a constant process of re-examining and re-inventing of how we do, see, feel, share, and experience our world together.
Design is a verb, it’s what we do as humans. Design it what we are, naturally designed by time and the generations before us. We are designed to design, to create better ways of being for the generations to come. Design is a process, an evolution.