We’re keeping your ears and minds warm between seasons by spotlighting the shows and creators who are moving us, challenging us, and reminding us why we do what we do.

This week, Aiwan shares a pick close to her heart: an episode from The Pursuit Playbook hosted by Aprileen Alexander - a finance powerhouse, creative producer, and former gal-dem team member. Produced by AiAi Studios, the show is a masterclass in navigating corporate spaces as a Black woman. It’s giving honesty, guts, and unapologetic ambition.

The featured episode, Echoes from the C-Suite: Risking It All with Shani Gonzalez, profiles the extraordinary journey of Shani, Executive VP and Managing Director at Warner Chappell Music UK. She’s launched the careers of global icons like Justin Bieber and Travis Scott, built a legacy through fearless risk-taking, and leads with the kind of strategic instinct and heart-first leadership that Aiwan sees as pure Rigour & Flow.

Together, we reflect on what it means to back yourself, trust your gut, and rewrite the playbook for creative and corporate leadership. If you’ve ever wondered how to move with conviction in industries that weren’t built with you in mind — this one’s for you.

Listen to The Pursuit Playbook by Aprileen Alexander on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts:

https://open.spotify.com/show/48HkvSF1wmEifiM05Nswqy

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We’re back with another Notes from the Margins - our freestyle format where we bring the ideas, tensions, and fragments we’re still sitting with.

This one’s all about the stuff that didn’t feel done. The thoughts that followed us around. And the threads we couldn’t let go of.

First, we return to Episode 1, and our conversation about faith and queerness as Africans. We talk about what it meant to open the podcast with that episode, what we held back at the time, and how the tension between visibility and vulnerability has followed us ever since.

In our second segment, Aiwan returns to our discussion of The Crip Walk from Episode 2 on The Policing of Black Thought, and delves into new insights, learnings, and alternative storytelling around the origins of the dance, including Serena Williams' return to it during her recent Super Bowl performance with Kendrick Lamar. We explore the erasure of this history, what it reveals about disability justice and the Black community, and how we’re trying to deepen our solidarity with Black disabled siblings in our own work.

Finally, Tamanda circles back to Episode 4, What It Costs to Have a Baby, and delves deeper into the data on the availability of Black sperm donors in the UK. Drawing on an article shared by Dr Celestin Okoroji, we also dig deeper into compounding health inequalities faced by Black academic women with chronic reproductive health conditions.

This episode isn’t just a look back. It’s a season wrap. A reckoning. A moment to honour what we carried into Season 1, and what we’re carrying out of it as we head into a new era of the show.

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We decided to do something a little different...

We went LIVE for the very first time. To reflect on the journey so far, answer listener questions, and share a glimpse of life behind the scenes of Rigour & Flow. What followed was a surprising, hilarious, and deeply moving encounter with the people who’ve been with us from the jump.

We were joined by listeners from across our community - some who’ve known us for years, others who found us through the podcast - and we talked about everything from what surprised you most about the show to your favourite moments (including the Naija accent requests?!). You asked for uncut episodes, more behind-the-scenes, and some of you even suggested guests. We shared a few things we haven’t said before - including how we really feel about “weird coupley podcast energy.”

And then, just as things got good... we were booted off Instagram Live. Without warning. But you came back. Nearly every single one of you returned to the second stream - which, someone said, “would be a good crowd in a real-life room.” That moment? It meant everything.

Now we’re back to share our lightly edited version of the LIVE so anyone who couldn’t join can catch up. As it stands, this is an episode about our community. About what it means to think you might end up speaking into the void - only to find the void you imagined actually speaks back. And is absolutely ready to catch you.

It’s messy, unscripted, honest, and full of love. It’s a soft ending and a bold beginning. And we couldn’t be more grateful so many of you joined our little island of magic.

💬 In this episode:

• Season One reflections from Aiwan, Tamanda and you - the fam!
• What surprised us (and you) about making Rigour & Flow
• Behind-the-scenes realities of podcasting as a couple
• What we’ve learned from sharing publicly and showing up consistently
• The tech fail that kicked us off Instagram Live - and what happened next
• Listener feedback: favourite episodes, future guests, and format requests
• Our dreams for community-driven storytelling in Season Two

Community Shout-Out

This live episode wouldn’t have been what it was without the incredible people who showed up and showed out.

Huge love to Hollie (our behind-the-scenes magician) and Ade (our on-screen facilitator) - you held it down with grace, humour, and heart.

And thank you to everyone who joined us live - whether you caught the first stream, came back for part two, or watched the replay. We felt every bit of your presence.

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What if time wasn’t neutral? What if urgency was a trap? What if the clock, like so many systems, was never made with us in mind?

We step outside grind culture to ask how time works, and who it works for. From production schedules to academic timelines, we explore how time shapes us, pressures us, and polices us as we navigate systems that demand constant productivity - and often without care or a proper sense of our contexts.

Aiwan reflects on her journey as a filmmaker in extractive production environments, where tight turnarounds and top-down decisions often override wellbeing, due process, or nuance. She unpacks how creative work gets distorted by commercial timelines and what’s lost when deadlines take precedence over depth.

Tamanda shares how time functioned in her PhD - from the long haul of writing up to the pressure to always be producing. She speaks to the challenge of holding grief, illness, and care within systems that measure value by speed and visibility - and the toll of navigating slow processes inside fast institutions.

Together, we unpack the tension between polychronic time (cyclical, relational, fluid) and monochronic time (linear, rigid, task-driven), drawing on our experiences across entertainment, media, and research; between the continent and the diaspora, and from childhood to our current stage. We ask what it means to reclaim time - not just for rest, but for dignity, self-determination, and different ways of knowing.

This is an episode about pace, labour, and the politics of production- but also about boundaries, burnout, and what it means to move on our own terms.

In this episode:

• The systems that shape how time is managed, valued, and weaponised
• Production deadlines, extractive creative cycles, and burnout in media work
• Academic timelines, productivity pressures, and the myth of constant progress
• Polychronic vs. monochronic time - and why linearity doesn’t work for everyone
• How race, queerness, grief, and caring responsibilities disrupt dominant time norms
• The tension between institutional pace and lived experience
• What it means to reclaim time for rest, ritual, and deeper ways of working

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We’re taking it back to the roots - exploring the stories, struggles, and politics wrapped up in Black hair.

Aiwan opens up about being raised in a Pentecostal church that saw pride and beauty as sin - where dreadlocks were demonised, and even beads were banned. Tamanda reflects on her early obsession with Toni Braxton, the pain of getting her hair chemically straightened, and the complex cocktail of shame, admiration and resistance that came with being the girl with “the good hair.”

Together, we talk about where shame starts, how beauty hierarchies are enforced, and why so many of our earliest hair memories still sting. We share the pain and pride of coming into our own - from church restrictions to Nollywood tropes, from Black queer aesthetic codes to the pressure of salon culture and the silent scabs we’ve picked at school.

Together we ask:

• Who gets to define what’s “good hair”?
• Why are some textures still more ‘acceptable’ than others - even in natural hair spaces?
• What’s really in the products we’ve been putting on our scalps since childhood?
• And what does it look like to reclaim joy, health, and self-expression on our own terms?

This is a conversation about hair. And also a reflection on power, care, and reclamation. From chemical burns and hair-based bullying to Black queer self-discovery and political pride, this episode is a love letter to every Black person navigating their own hair story.

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We explore the complicated inheritance of being Black and British - and how migration, class, race, and belonging continue to shape our stories today.

Aiwan reflects on growing up in Britain as the daughter of a Nigerian immigrant mum, caught between a confident Nigerian identity at home and a fraught, often hostile Black Britishness outside it. Meanwhile, Tamanda shares what it meant to migrate from Botswana as a child, and how her understanding of Blackness and Britishness was turned upside down the moment she arrived.

Together, we unpack what it means to "become" Black in Britain: how migration, racism, and class shape identity; why Africa remains a powerful anchor for many; and how the lines between African, Caribbean, and Black British experiences were drawn - and sometimes weaponised - against us.

We dive into the myths we inherited about Britain as a land of plenty; the painful rifts between African and Caribbean communities; and the possibilities, pitfalls, and erasures hidden inside the phrase “political Blackness.” We also talk about colourism, mixed heritage, and the messy, unfinished project of Black British belonging - asking what solidarity could look like when we stop pretending our differences don't exist.

This is an episode about identity, for sure! But, more than that, it's about survival, memory, migration, and how Black Britishness was, and still is, fiercely fought for rather than freely given.

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We open up about two family stories that changed how we understand mental health, culture, and the systems that claim to heal us.

Tamanda shares the story of her mother's diagnosis - and the painful reality of watching an indigenous African spiritual tradition be misread as delusion by a colonial medical model. Aiwan reflects on her own mother’s experience during the Covid-19 pandemic, when powerful nightly devotions were mistaken for pathology by an overstretched hospital system.

Together, we explore the thin, and often dangerous, line between faith and pathology.

We ask: When is a mental health issue truly an illness, and when is it a misunderstood expression of faith, culture, or trauma? What happens when healthcare systems don't recognise the spiritual and cultural realities of those they serve? And how does power shape diagnosis of Black people from the days of enslavement to the present?

Drawing from personal experience, community research, and historical context, we reflect on how our mothers’ stories reveal a larger truth about Black families, dignity, and survival. We discuss the legacy of colonial psychiatry, the deep cultural losses hidden inside clinical “treatments,” and why culturally sensitive care isn’t a luxury - it’s a necessity.

This episode is about systems, yes! …But it’s also about love, memory, spirit, and the everyday struggle to be fully seen.

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For this episode of Rigour & Flow, we’re back with another Notes From the Margins - our free-flowing format where we each bring something we can't stop thinking about.

Tamanda dives deep into the messy, glamorous world of Netflix’s Young, Famous & African. From Pan-African fame and chaotic conflict styles, we delve deep into the question of how reality TV sometimes hits deeper than we expect.

Aiwan brings us into the wild politics of Yellowstone - a neo-Western where land, capitalism, and colonialism collide, and where the lines between oppressor and oppressed blur fast. And in which we also ask, ‘Who are the Black cowboys?!’

And we respond to a word of warning from a friend: how do you host a podcast with your partner without doing "weird coupley sh*t"? We look at what we learned from We Can Do Hard Things and consider the strange art of sharing your life online.

From luxury mansions in Johannesburg to cowboy dynasties in Montana to the strange vulnerability of speaking publicly with someone you love - this episode is all about power, culture, and connection.

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