facultyexplore advaya’s teachers
Explore advaya's faculty of teachers, scientists, practitioners, philosophers and storytellers, who share multidimensional, local and diverse narratives from across the world.
Bayo Akomolafe
Sophie Strand
Satish Kumar
Vandana Shiva
Veronica Strang
Manda Scott
Beloved Sara Zaltash
David Abram
Dr Andreas Weber
David Whyte
Helena Norberg-Hodge
Dr. Predrag Slijepcevic
Charles Eisenstein
Aisha Paris Smith
Brontë Velez
Anwulika Okonjo
Anwulika Okonjo is a global social impact strategist and communications consultant, especially passionate about working with women-led businesses/organisations and women/youth/African/black people focused initiatives across a broad range of issue areas.
Anwulika is a social entrepreneur, brand, impact and digital strategist whose work focuses on storytelling, knowledge-sharing, and community-oriented innovations to influence social and systemic change.
She combines rigorous strategic thinking with creative flair to develop inventive brands, products and campaigns. Anwulika also curates learning experiences, media projects and events with world-renowned thinkers and change-makers that have given hundreds of people globally access to regenerative conversations and deep explorations of the most pressing issues of our time.
She works to critically interrogate societal relations/issues, including in the social internet ecosystem, while harnessing the power of liberatory practices, community engagement and digital technologies to facilitate critical dialogues and knowledge-sharing in just, healthy ways.
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Radical women & stereotypes
Throughout history, women who have not conformed to societal expectations or who were deemed too powerful have been demonised and mischaracterised. In this session we will take a historical lens and explore what tactics have been used to subdue and silence radical, wilful women, and how radical women have resisted repression. We will look at how certain archetypes have been subverted and turned into oppressive stereotypes used to diminish female power. We will discuss what these stereotypes are and how we can rethink ideas about radical women. How can we reclaim these principal archetypes, reappropriating them and transforming them from tools of oppression into tools of emancipation? This session will involve spinning tales of witchcraft, recasting various feminine archetypes, pluralising the divine feminine, and opening ourselves to a world of new cultural stories while healing ancient wounds.
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Transformative collectives and movements
Women’s collectives and movements play an essential role in enabling women to exercise power, support each other and transform society. What can we learn from historical and present day women’s movements? How do we build powerful collectives, keeping in mind the importance and difficulty of intersectionality? Considering the imbalances of power among women geographically and historically and the consequent tensions, how can we overcome them to build global solidarities and interconnected women’s movements?
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Reclaiming self
True transformation starts from within. One of the greatest struggles of patriarchal domination is how it alienates women from their own internal power and agency. We will look at what mechanisms cause this, and what structures, attitudes and practices we can adopt to begin to reclaim self, shift our internal narratives, build power from within, and trust intuition and emotion. How do we restore ourselves from a cisheteropatriarchal capitalist society that is frequently violent, exploitative and oppressive, in a way that does not replicate and reproduce these structures of harm?
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Transcending the power-over paradigm
Ahead of advaya’s online course Women and Power: Reclaiming & Reimagining Power in the World Today, host Anwulika Okonjo speaks with Riane Eisler, a social systems scientist, cultural historian, futurist and attorney whose research, writing and speaking has transformed millions. Known for her work in advancing for partnership-based societies, and diagnosing our crises as a result of a power-over paradigm, Riane will lead the opening session of our course. In this conversation with Riane, we explored her academic approach, the key findings of her famous book The Chalice and the Blade, the myth of war as human nature, transcending binary thinking and understanding the power-over paradigm and how we transform it, and more.
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Rerooting relationship
Do we as individuals have the power of peace? What is meant as women power in this process? What is needed to create a movement, which is stronger than all violence will and can have success? What to do in this challenging time. So we know and have a vision of a healed planet earth and a humanity which left the pattern of war? Is it true: Where there is love there can not be war? How does a society look like, where we in live in peace with the earth and all her beings.
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Rituals and expression
Whether it’s protest, poetry, dance or rites of passage, rituals inform all aspects of women’s lives, creating space for healing ancestral wounds, restoring, reconciling, and expanding the feminine, celebration and exercises of personal and collective power. We will explore practices, rituals and forms of expression and their historical roots, delving into the Indigenous sciences of Thriving Life, African-Centered Wisdom Traditions, earth-based spiritual traditions, and more, hearing from women across generations and cultures.
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Understanding power and alienation, and reclaiming memory
In this opening session, we will explore how power operates within the dominant cultural paradigm along lines of domination, or power-over. We will look at the roots of that in ancient history, and how it became synonymous with a masculine power, patriarchy, and therefore men. We will explore how this form of power has permeated human relationship and society, and how it enables oppressive hierarchies and colonial relationships to continue. We will also look at other forms of power: forms based around partnership, power-with rather than power-over; the roots of these in ancient land based and indigenous societies; and how these forms of power became synonymous with feminine power, and therefore women. We will interrogate how women (and non-men) have been alienated from power and erased from collective memory historically, and what reclamation/restoration looks like. In this session we will discuss the politics of memory, restoring narrative justice, rewriting history, and how we can begin building cultural power.
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Transformative women leaders
This session rounds out the first part of the course: this week we ask, who are the women leaders among us who are building new forms of cultural power? In a world where the various spaces we inhabit are desperately in need of new voices and ways of leadership, how are these transformative women leaders uprooting long-held, dominant ideas of power, growth, building, and what are they allowing to take root instead?