Rigour & Flow with Aiwan and Tamanda

Why are men missing from the reproductive health conversation? And what happens when we treat reproductive health as women's business alone?In the first of our two-part deep dive into Black maternal and reproductive health, Aiwan and Tamanda challenge some of the assumptions shaping how we talk about our bodies, fertility, pregnancy, childbirth and care.When we talk about reproductive health, the conversation almost always centres women - and often begins and ends with pregnancy and childbirth. But where does that leave men? Not just as fathers, partners and advocates, but as people with their own reproductive health needs, experiences, fears and vulnerabilities?And what does this narrow framing mean for women, whose reproductive lives extend far beyond pregnancy and motherhood?Drawing on deeply personal experiences, research and the Disney+ documentary Aftershock, we explore the silence, shame, medical inequalities and intergenerational experiences that shape reproductive health across our lives.From endometriosis, fibroids and fertility struggles to men's sexual and reproductive health, pregnancy loss, birth trauma and the responsibilities we share, this conversation asks what we miss when reproductive health is treated as somebody else's business.🎙️ In this episode:What About Men? Why men are so often missing from reproductive health conversations - and why their role extends far beyond supporting women through pregnancy and childbirth.Men's Bodies, Men's Health: Breaking the silence around male fertility, erectile dysfunction, prostate health, medical examinations and the stigma that prevents men from discussing their reproductive experiences.Fathers, Partners & Shared Responsibility: Exploring the emotional experiences of men and partners navigating pregnancy, childbirth, loss and medical care - and why reproductive health should never be an individual burden.The 28-Year Diagnosis: Tamanda reflects on her experiences of endometriosis, fibroids and fertility investigations, challenging the tendency to reduce women's reproductive health to pregnancy and motherhood.The Silence We Inherit: From periods and puberty to fertility, sexual health and family trauma, we examine how shame, secrecy and intergenerational experiences shape our relationships with our bodies.Lived and Family Memories: From carrying a full-term pregnancy loss across borders to the enduring trauma of witnessing birth complications and clinical apathy firsthand.Beyond the Mortality Statistics: Drawing on Aftershock, campaigns like Five X More, and the Black maternal health crisis, we explore why reproductive health conversations so often begin and end with death, rather than the much wider need for accountability across disparities in health.Reproductive health isn't just women's business. It's everybody's business.🔜 COMING NEXT - PART 2: We turn our attention specifically to Black maternal health in Britain, exploring racial inequalities in NHS maternity care, the experiences of Black mothers, and what our own community-led research reveals about medical bias, women's choices and the urgent need for systemic change.Share your reflections in the comments or send us a voice note. We'd love to hear from you.🎧 Listen wherever you get your podcasts.🎥 Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/tMQgE4-JEJk🔁 Share with someone who believes reproductive health is everybody's business☕ Support the show: https://buymeacoffee.com/rigourandflow Content note: This episode discusses maternal death, stillbirth, pregnancy loss, medical trauma and reproductive healthcare experiences.Please 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.

What was it like to grow up Black in Belfast during the Troubles? In Northern Ireland in the late 1990s, religious identity could carry life-or-death consequences: Are you Catholic or Protestant? Which neighbourhood are you from? Which school do you attend? To prepare Tamanda for her schooling in Belfast in 1997 - for what was supposed to be a three-month stay that turned into three years - her parents sat her down with anxious tongue-in-cheek advice: "If anyone asks if you're Catholic or Protestant, don't say you're either. Tell them you're Muslim."Entering Hunterhouse College - a mixed-faith school perched right on the boundary line where red, white and blue painted curbs ended and the Catholic neighbourhood began across the traffic lights - she became the only student of colour in the entire school. In a divided society that ran on instantly categorising people based on religions and political allegiance, nobody had a script for where a Black mixed-race girl belonged.In this episode, Aiwan and Tamanda explore the realities of living through the end of a 30-year sectarian conflict and the beginnings of the peace process. Tamanda recalls the surreal, triggering experience of watching Derry Girls and realising parts of it had been filmed inside her actual secondary school in Finaghy - from Sister Michael’s office - the exact room where Tamanda was once hauled in front of the headmistress and suspended - to the dining hall where she ate lunch every day. But behind the teenage friendships, romances and school exchanges lay the realities of sectarian division: painted kerbs, flags, bomb alerts, military presence and classmates whose families had experienced devastating violence. Together, we explore how conflict shapes identity and belonging, the contradictions of Britain's colonial narratives, and how trauma travels across generations. As Northern Ireland confronts contemporary racism and anti-immigrant violence, we ask: What happens when peacebuilding addresses one form of division but fails to equip future generations to understand others?🎙️In this episode:Life in Belfast (1997–2000): Moving to Northern Ireland in the run-up to the Good Friday Agreement.School on the Borderline: Hunterhouse College, painted kerbs, Union Jacks and sectarian boundary lines.The Only Black Girl in the Frame: Isolation, boarding-school photographs and being reduced to stereotypes about Africa.Neither Catholic nor Protestant, But Both: How being Black complicated the sectarian categories through which people understood belonging.Derry Girls and Cultural Memory: Revisiting a childhood shaped by conflict, and how younger generations inherit its legacies.Britain, Ireland and Colonial History: What we learn — and fail to learn — about empire, violence and national identity.Beyond Green and Orange: Contemporary anti-Black racism, anti-immigrant sentiment and why peace education must move beyond Catholic–Protestant dialogue to include racial literacy.🎧 Listen wherever you get your podcasts.🎥 Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/U7muZw2ZIsw 🔁 Share with someone who wants to hear the untold stories of growing up during The Troubles☕ Support the show: 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.

When pop star Tyla identified herself as “Coloured,” it broke the internet. For many Black Americans, the word carries the brutal legacy of Jim Crow segregation. In Britain, it’s an outdated, offensive label once used broadly for non-white people. But in Southern Africa, Coloured is a distinct, recognised cultural and ethnic identity with centuries of its own history, heritage and complex positioning within colonial and apartheid hierarchies.Same word. Completely different histories.In this episode of Rigour & Flow, Aiwan and Tamanda untangle what happens when American racial frameworks are projected onto the rest of the world. Aiwan recalls the fierce rejection of “Coloured” in Black British communities, while Tamanda breaks down why being mixed-race does not automatically make someone Coloured in Southern Africa.The conversation then arrives at the University of the Western Cape (UWC). Established under apartheid specifically for Coloured students, UWC rebelled against its founding purpose to become an intellectual home of the anti-apartheid left. For Tamanda, arriving as a postdoctoral fellow brought epistemic relief and then she met the university registration form: Black African. White. Indian. Coloured. Other.Which box does a mixed-race Motswana-British academic tick? And what happens when a system designed to tackle historical injustice ends up erasing the very complexities it tries to measure?🎙️In this episode:The Tyla controversy: What this global race conversation revealed about American exceptionalism through a Black lens.Coloured ≠ mixed-race: Why the two identities are not interchangeable in Southern Africa.Ever shifting language: From “coloured” to “people of colour” to a fierce re-assertion of Black identity.Apartheid’s racial ladder: How legal categories created hierarchies between Black, Coloured, Indian and White communities.The story of UWC: How an education institution designed to enforce segregation transformed into a centre of resistance.The implication of the "Other" box: When administrative categories fail to reflect human reality.Honorary whites and the absurdity of race: What Japan, China and apartheid reveal about racial classification.Affirmative action today: Does the legacy classification system still serve post-apartheid South Africa? And what of the global conversation this raises?The question here is: As we try to make sense of the ‘nonsense’ surrounding race, can we acknowledge that race is constructed while still measuring the inequality created through it?🎧 Listen wherever you get your podcasts.🎥 Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/toVHNuj6yk8 ☕ Support the show: https://buymeacoffee.com/rigourandflow🔁 If this conversation resonated with you, please share it with a friendPlease 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.

Philanthropy literally means “the love of humanity.” So why does Aiwan hear something else? The “love of control”?Last week on Rigour & Flow, we explored the deeply personal side of charity. Aiwan grew up receiving it. Tamanda was socialised to give it. And what surfaced between us in the studio were visceral class differences. This week, we follow the money. After spending the past year immersed in understanding the UK philanthropic sector through our work with The Phoenix Way, we unpack a system whose roots stretch back well over a thousand years. The conversation spans from the rise of medieval monasteries and their dissolution under Henry VIII, to the Victorian Poor Laws and the emergence of the modern "Philanthropic Industrial Complex." Throughout this history, one question keeps resurfacing: Who is deemed “deserving” of help, and who gets to decide? Because those judgments haven’t disappeared. They’ve simply changed hands with the passage of time.From the transformative power of endowments - perpetual wealth vs. short-term grants - to the uncomfortable origins of institutional fortunes tied to colonialism, slavery and empire, we confront the fundamental issue: If the source of your wealth is exploitation, can “charity” ever truly be considered repair?This episode moves beyond “giving” toward solidarity - or even reparations. Because true liberation isn't asking for a seat at someone else’s table; it’s building and owning the table ourselves.🎙️In this episode:Revisiting the Messy Middle: Unpacking the class differences and discomfort that surfaced in Episode 57.Inside the Philanthropic Industrial Complex: What a year documenting the story of The Phoenix Way revealed about how philanthropic funding actually works.Endowments and Agency: Why perpetual wealth and ownership matter far more than applying for another grant.Deserving vs. Undeserving: How Tudor Poor Laws and Victorian workhouses still dictate modern welfare and funding rhetoric.Empire’s Financial Afterlife: When institutional wealth is rooted in historical exploitation and colonial extraction.The "Risk" Paradox: Why Black and Brown organisations are framed simultaneously as most in need and most financially risky.A Seat at the Table vs. Owning the Table: Why representation and participatory grant-making don’t fundamentally transfer actual wealth or power.Charity vs. Solidarity: Moving from paternalistic aid to mutual liberation: "Your liberation is bound up with mine."🎧 Listen wherever you get your podcasts🎥 Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/MSmhkETEhcM☕ Want to support the show? https://buymeacoffee.com/rigourandflow🔁 Share with someone working in the sector or exploring wealth justice and agency.CORRECTION: During this episode, Tamanda incorrectly state that charities regulated by the Charity Commission are required to be “apolitical”. Charities can campaign and engage in political activity where this advances their charitable purposes, but must remain independent of party politics. We’ve kept the discussion in the episode, but explain why this distinction matters - and how it affects the wider argument about the policing of political activity - in our full correction and accompanying resources on Substack: https://rigourandflow.substack.com/ Please 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.

When it comes to charity, are you the person who gives or the person who receives? That’s where this episode started. Then we got to the question we actually needed to answer: “Who is charity ultimately for?”We thought we were sitting down to have a routine conversation about charitable giving. Instead, we uncovered just how starkly race, class and colonial legacies have conditioned us to understand what the word charity even means. Aiwan grew up on a London council estate, receiving free school meals, bright orange uniform vouchers, and jumble-sale clothes. Charity caused her to carry the shame of being poor. Tamanda grew up in Botswana, attended private school and was socialised into “community service” and “charitable giving” as an unquestioned obligation of privilege. Something to be patted on the back for, and document on her CV as a marker of her “good deeds”One learned charity from the position of the recipient; the other from the position of the giver. And when those two experiences collide in the studio, the conversation gets unexpectedly raw.From the "single story" of African famine imagery, to the ethics of megachurch tithing and being awarded a certificate for "holding the sickest child" on a school trip to Gambia, we unpack the stories society tells about who deserves help and who gets to provide it.This is not a neat conversation. It's one about privilege, shame, faith, race, class, white and maybe even Black saviourism! We speak on inequality, community, aid and the psychological need to see ourselves as people who “do good”, while making others feel bad. In this episode:The giver and the given-to: How Aiwan and Tamanda learned charity from opposite sides of the class divideGiving without the performance: Botswana, Botho and community service as a collective social responsibilityWeaponising Africa’s ‘Single Story’: What 80s famine appeals and BBC Children in Need did to Black and working class children growing up in Britain.Gambia and the gross certificate: Reflecting on elite school voluntourism trip and the moment Tamanda was awarded a certificate for “holding the sickest child”The megachurch’s no-access tithe table: When institutional giving prioritises private jets while turning away an evicted family in freezing weatherWho gets to be the “saviour”?: White saviourism, Black saviourism, voluntourism and the class based hierarchies of “doing good”The ultimate systemic question: Does charity solve inequality, or does it merely soothe the conscience of the privileged while keeping structural inequality intact?🎧 Listen wherever you get your podcasts🎥 Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/VdQFiJz2VUY 🔁 Share this episode with someone thinking about inequality, classicism, charity and philanthropy☕ Support the show: https://buymeacoffee.com/rigourandflowThis is Part One of a two-part series interrogating the ethics, psychology and structural politics of charity and philanthropy.Please 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.