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Rigour & Flow with Aiwan and Tamanda

Rigour & Flow with Aiwan and Tamanda

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The show where business meets love, and culture meets critique. We’re Aiwan and Tamanda, two Black women with 20 years each in entertainment, research, and social justice. We’re also a married couple figuring out what it means to build a life and two businesses together.


We'll talk about the realities of running a business, making creative work that matters, and navigating research with integrity.


What You’ll Find:

  • Honest conversations on entrepreneurship, research, and creativity.
  • Unpacking the intersections of business, leadership, relationships, and identity.
  • Hot takes on media, culture, and social change.
  • Guest insights from entrepreneurs, researchers, and artists.

If you’re navigating business, love, and the messiness of life while trying to do meaningful work, you’re in the right place.

Episodes drop every Tuesday!

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

AiAi Studios Beziehungen Management & Leadership Sozialwissenschaften Ökonomie
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  • Why Do Institutions Protect Perpetrators Over Survivors? | Whistleblowing & Power

    Why Do Institutions Protect Perpetrators Over Survivors? | Whistleblowing & Power
    Feb 10 2026

    Whistleblowing is often framed as an act of courage. But in practice, it is more often met with punishment, isolation and quiet retaliation.


    In this episode of Rigour & Flow, we examine what actually happens when people tell the truth inside institutions that claim to value transparency, ethics and accountability.


    Drawing on lived experience, research and patterns across multiple sectors - including academia, media, charities and the creative industries - we explore why whistleblowers so often become the problem, while harm is minimised, managed or protected.


    We explore the gap between official reporting processes and informal power: how complaints are received, reframed, delayed or quietly buried; why “doing the right thing” frequently backfires and how institutions close ranks when truth threatens reputation, funding or authority.


    Similarly, we explore what happens when allegations of wrongdoing enter the public sphere, how reactions play out on social media, and what we’ve encountered ourselves since launching the show.


    This is a discussion about retaliation that doesn’t always look dramatic, but is deeply effective. It’s about progressive spaces that punish, often reproducing the same silencing they claim to oppose. And it’s about the emotional, professional and psychological costs of refusing to stay quiet.


    Rather than offering a simple morality tale, we sit with the uncomfortable reality: that silence is often rewarded, truth is seen as a liability, and whistleblowers are rarely protected in the ways policy suggests.


    This episode is for anyone who has ever been told to report concerns and then learned directly the cost of doing so.

    🎙️ In this episode:

    • The system punishes courage: why speaking up often triggers retaliation rather than protection
    • The whistleblowing myth: how “doing the right thing” is celebrated rhetorically but punished in practice
    • The whistleblowing paradox: why institutions tell you to report harm, until you actually do
    • Why systems close ranks: reputation management, risk containment and the quiet defence of power
    • Progressive spaces aren’t exempt: how charities, media, academia and creative industries reproduce the same silencing dynamics
    • Retaliation without spectacle: exclusion, stalled careers, informal blacklisting and being reframed as “difficult”
    • Silence as currency: how compliance, restraint and loyalty are rewarded over truth
    • What accountability would actually require and why institutions resist it


    🎧 Listen wherever you get your podcasts

    🎥 Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/FWzSfpNpimI

    🔁 Share with someone thinking about power and accountability


    ☕ Want to support the show? Buy us a coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/rigourandflow

    Please rate, review and subscribe for weekly episodes.

    Connect with us on:

    • TikTok
    • Instagram
    • LinkedIn
    • AiAi Studios
    • Roots & Rigour


    This is an AiAi Studios Production

    ©AiAi Studios 2025

    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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    53 Min.
  • Whitewashed Lecture Halls | African Knowledges and the Limits of the Western Higher Education

    Whitewashed Lecture Halls | African Knowledges and the Limits of the Western Higher Education
    Feb 3 2026
    African knowledges have always been everywhere, in language, land, healing and survival. Yet most of us passed through the highest levels of education without ever encountering them. In this episode, we step into the lecture halls of “higher” education and ask what it means to be trained to forget, and who that forgetting ultimately serves. We begin inside higher education itself. Tamanda reflects on achieving the highest formal qualification possible, a PhD, while being taught almost nothing about Black people, African histories or global majority cultures within the core curriculum. She speaks about navigating universities that were not built for us, encountering racism and silencing, being mocked for studying race, and carrying the emotional weight of ancestral absence inside institutions that claim neutrality. From Britain and Northern Ireland to Southern Africa, we trace how entire peoples, geographies and ways of knowing have been written out of what counts as knowledge. Not by accident, but by design. From there, we go deeper. Together, we unpack how higher education operates through state-sanctioned curricula where silence is framed as objectivity and colonial histories are avoided rather than confronted. We explore how African spiritual, ecological and communal ways of knowing were dismissed as backward or dangerous, even as their insights were extracted, repackaged and profited from elsewhere. We confront epistemicide in practice. Dismissal, extraction, pathologisation and profit. We ask what this has cost a world now facing ecological collapse, mental health crises, and deep social fragmentation. This is not only a loss borne by Africans and Caribbeans, but a collective impoverishment of how humanity understands care, land, community and survival. In closing, we return to vital African knowledges themselves. Knowledge rooted in connection, collective life, healing, land and embodiment. Tamanda reflects on what she reclaimed during her PhD, her commitment to documenting the knowledge of her ancestors, and why putting our stories on record matters in systems where what is written is what is recognised. This is a conversation about remembering. About power. And about why African knowledges are not supplementary or symbolic, but essential to making sense of the world we are living in now. 🎙️ In this episode:Colonial higher education exposed: What higher education reveals about Black history erasure in universities State-sanctioned silence: How colonial curricula erase entire peoples, geographies and colonial historiesErasure by design: Why African knowledges were dismissed, pathologised and written out of what counts as knowledgeWho gets to be a knower: Power, legitimacy and the marginalisation of Black academics in white institutionsEpistemicide in practice: The global consequences of destroying indigenous ways of knowing and insightWhat modernity forgot: How the strength of collective life, connection and ritual were lost in the pursuit of profit and progressReclaiming the archive: On ‘writing what I like’ and why putting ancestral knowledge on record matters deeplyKnowledge for everyone: Why African knowledges are not niche or symbolic, and what it costs us to keep pretending they are 🎧 Listen wherever you get your podcasts
🎥 Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/x5RYSYRRs5Y🔁 Share with someone thinking about knowledge, power and belonging📬 Reflections or stories to share? rigourandflow@gmail.com☕ Want to support the show? Buy us a coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/rigourandflowPlease rate, review and subscribe for weekly episodes.Connect with us on:TikTokInstagramLinkedInAiAi StudiosRoots & RigourThis is an AiAi Studios Production©AiAi Studios 2025 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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    55 Min.
  • Black Kids, White Classrooms: Black History Erasure, Colonial Control & Britain’s Education System

    Black Kids, White Classrooms: Black History Erasure, Colonial Control & Britain’s Education System
    Jan 27 2026
    Education is not neutral. And for Black children, it is rarely complete. School is often the first place where erasure is formalised, belonging becomes conditional, and history is taught as if our people were a footnote rather than the foundation.In this episode, we turn our attention to education - not as a neutral site of learning, but as a powerful system of selection, silence, and control. Drawing on our own schooling across Botswana, Northern Ireland, London, Leeds, and the Midlands, we reflect on what we were taught, what we internalised, and what we later had to unlearn. Aiwan reflects on moving from a Black-majority school in South-East London to predominantly white classrooms in Leeds, navigating the silence around race while carrying the weight of being “the only one.” She speaks about the hidden curriculum - how schools quietly teach you who is centred, who is valued, and who is merely tolerated - and why supplementing formal education at home became essential to developing a fuller sense of self. Tamanda draws on her education in Botswana, Northern Ireland, and England, as well as her later academic experience, to examine how education systems claim neutrality while carefully avoiding power. She reflects on moments where critical thinking was praised in theory, yet penalised in practice - revealing the tight boundaries around what could be questioned, named, or challenged. Together, we explore how Black history is routinely framed as optional or supplementary in UK schooling, rather than foundational to understanding Britain itself. We examine the expectation that Black families must fill the gaps - through Saturday schools, community learning, books, travel, and cultural memory - simply to counter what is missing, sanitised, or distorted in statutory education. We then consider what Aiwan learned over ten years educating young minds as a teacher herself. This is a conversation about power, not pedagogy alone. About what knowledge is protected, what knowledge is deferred, and why calls for “balance” or “neutrality” so often function to preserve the status quo. And about the long-term emotional and intellectual cost of learning in systems that demand assimilation while withholding recognition. 🎙️ In this episode:Encounters with erasure: Growing up Black in White education systems, beginning with the deafening silence around Black historyThe curated curriculum: How schooling disciplines curiosity, avoids power, and prioritises order over understandingSupplementing the system: Learning Black history beyond the classroom through Saturday schools, newspapers and self-directed studyWhen curiosity is punished: A defining moment where questioning the curriculum was met with anger, revealing what was “off limits”Entering teacher training: Confronting Eurocentric ideas of intelligence, culture and legitimacy as a Black womanTeaching from lived culture: What happened when music education met connective language, rhythm and real-world experienceBeyond Black History Month: Tokenism, cherry-picked heroes and how Black history must be continuous and connected to the nowChanging the status quo: What it means to teach with care, responsibility and cultural fluency for the next generation 🎧 Listen wherever you get your podcasts🎥 Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/qQ6-XNwHaeY🔁 Share with someone thinking about education, history, or curriculum reform☕ Want to support the show? Buy us a coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/rigourandflowPlease rate, review and subscribe for weekly episodes.Connect with us on:TikTokInstagramLinkedInAiAi StudiosRoots & RigourThis is an AiAi Studios Production©AiAi Studios 2025 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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    1 Std. und 32 Min.
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