New Ecologies of Knowledge with Nana Oforiatta Ayim & Felwine Sarr

This course invites participants to explore the plural, relational, and ancestral foundations of knowledge outside the dominant Western canon. Through dialogue, reflection, readings, and cultural texts, we explore what it means to build new ecologies of knowledge — rooted in the spiritual, the poetic, the community-based, and the world-to-come.

This course launches the Cultural Encyclopaedia beta as a living site of knowledge, return, and regeneration.

Learning Outcomes:

Participants will:

• Understand the concept of ecologies of knowledge through African, diasporic, and decolonial lenses
  
• Explore the epistemological limits of Enlightenment thought and Cartesian frameworks
  
• Encounter Indigenous, oral, ritual, poetic, and land-based forms of knowledge
  
• Begin to map their own knowledge lineages
  
• Contribute or reflect through entries, rituals, or conceptual prompts
  

What You’ll Receive:

• 4 guided sessions with readings, ritual, and dialogue
• Early access to the Cultural Encyclopaedia beta platform
• Texts and practices on return, repair, and cultural memory

• An invitation to contribute or reflect through entries or creative responses
  

Instructors:

Nana Oforiatta Ayim is a writer, curator, and founder of the Cultural Encyclopaedia and ANO Institute of Arts and Knowledge. Her work reimagines cultural institutions through indigenous African frameworks of knowledge, return, and ritual. She has been featured in The New York Times, Vogue, and The Financial Times, and curated Ghana’s first national pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

Felwine Sarr is a Senegalese philosopher, economist, and writer. He is Professor of African and Diaspora Studies at Duke University and co-author of the landmark Sarr-Savoy Report on the restitution of African cultural heritage. His work explores epistemic justice, plural knowledge systems, and Afrofuturist imagination.