We’re happy to introduce this year’s Green Academy keynote speakers!
BAYO AKOMOLAFE: PARAPOLITICS
Bayo Akomolafe (Ph.D.), rooted with the Yoruba people in a more-than-human world, is the father to Alethea Aanya and Kyah Jayden Abayomi, the grateful life-partner to Ije, son and brother. A widely celebrated international speaker, posthumanist thinker, poet, teacher, public intellectual, essayist, and author of two books, These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home (North Atlantic Books) and We Will Tell our Own Story: The Lions of Africa Speak, Bayo Akomolafe is the Founder of The Emergence Network, a planet-wide initiative that seeks to convene communities in new ways in response to the critical, civilizational challenges we face as a species. He is host of the postactivist course/festival/event, ‘We Will Dance with Mountains’. He currently lectures at Pacifica Graduate Institute, California. He sits on the Board of many organizations including Science and Non-Duality (US) and Ancient Futures (Australia).
In July 2022, Dr. Akomolafe was appointed the inaugural Global Senior Fellow of University of California’s (Berkeley) Othering and Belonging Institute. He is also the inaugural Special Fellow of the Schumacher Centre for New Economics, the Inaugural Scholar in Residence for the Aspen Institute, the inaugural Special Fellow for the Council of an Uncertain Human Future, as well as Visiting Scholar to Clark University, Massachusetts, USA (2024). He has been Fellow for The New Institute in Hamburg, Germany, and Visiting Critic-in-Residence for the Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles (2023).
He is the recipient of an Honorary Doctorate from the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) and has been Commencement Speaker in two universities convocation events. He is also the recipient of the New Thought Leadership Award 2021 and the Excellence in Ethnocultural Psychotherapy Award by the African Mental Health Summit 2022. In a ceremony in July 2023, the City of Portland (Maine, USA) awarded Dr. Akomolafe with the symbolic ‘Key to the City’ in recognition of his planet-wide work and achievements.
Dr. Akomolafe is a Member of the Club of Rome, a Fellow for the Royal Society of Arts in the UK, and an Ambassador for the Wellbeing Economy Alliance.
MELANIE RIEBACK: POST-GROWTH
ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Dr. Melanie Rieback is CEO/Co-founder of Radically Open Security (the world’s first not-for-profit computer security company), and “Post Growth” startup incubator Nonprofit Ventures. She is also a former Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the Free University of Amsterdam. She was named “Most Innovative IT Leader of the Netherlands” by CIO Magazine (TIM Award) in 2017, and one of the “9 Most Innovative Women in the European Union” (EU Women Innovators Prize) in 2019. She is also one of the 400 most successful women in the Netherlands by Viva Magazine (Viva400) in 2010 and 2017, and one of the fifty most inspiring women in tech (Inspiring Fifty Netherlands) in 2016, 2017, and 2019. Her company, Radically Open Security was named the 50th Most Innovative SME by the Dutch Chamber of Commerce (MKB Innovatie Top 100) in 2016.
MATTHIAS SCHMELZER: PLANNING IN THE AGE OF
CLIMATE BREAKDOWN
Matthias Schmelzer is an economic historian and transformation researcher. He is currently substitute Professor for Social-Ecological Transformation at the University of Flensburg. He is author of the award-winning “The Hegemony of Growth: The OECD and the Making of the Growth Paradigm” (Cambridge University Press, 2016), co-edited “Degrowth in Movement(s): Exploring pathways for transformation” and is co-author of “The Future is Degrowth: A Guide to a World beyond Capitalism” (Verso, 2022).
TINE DE MOOR: LOOKING THROUGH THE COMMONS-LENS: COLLECTIVE ACTION AS AN ENABLER OF SOCIETAL CHANGE IN PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE
Tine De Moor is an organisation historian, with specific expertise on the development of organisations formed bottom-up through collective action by citizens in their roles as consumers, employees, producers, entepreneurs, and often with primarily economic activities. In many cases these organisations are hybrid in their purpose: they are set-up to both provide access to goods and services to their members but also envisage positive contributions to society. Her work focusses on such organisations originating from the late medieval period -as in the form of guilds, commons, ….- to later on the development of cooperatives up to the present-day with many social enterprises in many forms, all falling under the umbrella-term of institutions for collective action. Currently her main interest goes to understanding what leads to cooperation within such organisations (what drives individuals within organisations- to change their behavior for the collective benefit of the group? Which institutional triggers can incentivize people to cooperate?), to what kind of group dynamics lead to cooperative behaviour (what is the optimal membership size and level of heterogeneity within organisations?), to the consequences of specific modes of governance within organisations that lead to prosocial behavior, to understanding why specific types of organisations emerge and disappear over time and which types of diffusion and scaling can be detected over time. All these research questions and topics are part of De Moor’s interest in contributing to supporting citizens in building organisations that can act as vehicles for societal transitions in energy, care, mobility, housing… For her research she uses both an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approach, whereby collaborations with a wide variety of disciplines (history, management, economics, political sciences, biology, sociology…..) and various stakeholder groups are fundamental. She is currently full professor at the Rotterdam School of Management; before she was full professor at Utrecht University.
She has received several large international and Dutch grants and has published widely in top journals within different disciplines and with major publishers as Oxford University Press and Cambridge University press.
Photo by: Mirjam Lems