• Aaliyah Ibrahim, a writer and an international development practicioner
• Gbope Onigbanjo, a consultant and researcher on international affairs, peace studies, and political economy
• Chiamaka Dike, a journalist
• Dede Israel, a writer and research analyst
• Amanda Madumere, an ed-tech entrepreneur and arts administrator
• Deborah Iyalagha, a writer and nursing student
• Keren Lasme, an artist and researcher

This Sunday, I bring you a conversation I had with six people who joined the Studio Styles text club meeting on July 6, 2024. This was the third week of discussing Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
As with all our club meetings, the conversation moved from the text and into our everyday lives to explore how we can apply the ideas to action in our lives, what changes we’d like to see in the world and how we can contribute to making that change. We went on to discuss what fear is good for, feeling the fear and protesting anyway, #EndSARS and the question of whether Nigeria is a psychopathic entity not worth dialoguing with, the intelligence of plants and the potential of spirituality and plant medicine as transformative tools of change. It was from this conversation that I picked up the practice of using ‘life-affirming’ as a metric by which I now assess my actions and beliefs

• 01:10 Exploring Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed
• 06:35 Challenging Workplace Norms and Individual Freedom
• 12:03 The Limits of Dialogue in Liberation
• 14:58 Navigating Fear in Society
• 18:46 Imagining a Safe World
• 29:13 Life-Affirming Practices/What is the 'Human'
• 34:08 Spirituality and Plant Medicine as Tools for Change