Rigour & Flow with Aiwan and Tamanda

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.

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.

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.

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.

Can you rewrite your money story – or are you stuck with the one you inherited? We crack open the money stories we inherited, and the ones we’re trying to rewrite.

Aiwan shares how growing up in a fundamentalist church taught her that true faith meant living modestly, shunning wealth, and being "in the world, but not of it" - until later encounters with the prosperity gospel preached that material success was a sign of divine favour. Meanwhile, Tamanda reflects on growing up firmly wedged between stark racialised wealth gaps within her family of origin - and how moving through different mindsets around privilege, poverty, and survival shaped her views on money, value, and freedom.

Together, we unpack the money mindsets we inherited, the financial habits we had to unlearn, and the scripts we’re now rewriting as a Black queer couple, building businesses, navigating generational change, and planning for a future still full of unknowns.

This episode is about the psychology of money, how race, class, and religion shape our attitudes to wealth, and why financial healing matters - for ourselves, and for our communities.

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.

The story we almost didn’t tell - a personal, unfiltered conversation about fertility, fibroids, and what it’s like to try and build a family as a Black queer couple.

Aiwan speaks candidly about internalised shame, cultural silence, and growing up in a faith community where sex, queerness, and pregnancy were taboo. Tamanda reflects on what it meant to come out of a ten-year heterosexual relationship without a child - and how a shocking fertility diagnosis turned everything upside down. Together, they walk through their experience navigating IVF as LGBTQ+ partners, from being misdiagnosed and dismissed to being held by an unexpected community of Black women on Instagram.

This episode is about reproductive injustice, maternal health inequalities, and what it costs - emotionally, physically and financially - to pursue parenthood outside the scripts we’re given. From NHS waiting lists to shared motherhood, from AI babies to planned parenthood, we talk about the long road to making a family when love isn’t enough and biology isn’t simple.

This is a story about grief, grace, and making peace with the babies we imagined - and still deeply long for.

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.

In this third episode of Rigour & Flow, we introduce our new three-part format - spotlighting the stories, ideas, and questions we can’t stop thinking about.

Aiwan unpacks a jarring moment in the hit show Call the Midwife to explore how Black people are represented (and misrepresented) on screen, and what it says about who’s behind the camera.

Tamanda dives into the story of HillmanTok - a viral, TikTok-powered learning community inspired by the legacy of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) - to ask what happens when research escapes the academy and meets the people. Named after the fictional Hillman College from A Different World, the initiative nods to the legacy of HBCUs while reimagining what radical Black education can look like online.

And in response to a big question from someone in our network, we wrestle with whether we’d ever take on a project involving Tommy Robinson - and what that says about values, representation, and the limits of pigeonholing.

This is an episode about culture, curiosity, and where we choose to show up - even when it’s uncomfortable.

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.

Why do so many Black creatives and researchers walk away from the industries they once fought to be part of? In this second episode of Rigour & Flow, we examine the silencing, sanitising, and sidelining of Black thought within white-dominated systems - from academia to media.

Drawing from Tamanda’s experiences in research and Aiwan’s in TV production, we unpack the emotional and professional toll of being “the only one in the room.” We explore what happens when your work is deemed “too much,” your language policed, or your presence tolerated while your truth is erased. From cultural gatekeeping and due diligence dramas, to Serena Williams’ Crip Walk, and the power of the pen - we ask: who gets to decide what’s acceptable, respectable, or worthy of being heard?

Whether you're a Black academic, a creative producer, or simply someone tired of performative inclusion, we invite you to reflect, rethink, and maybe even reclaim your voice. This episode is a call to honour Black brilliance in all its forms - uncensored, unfiltered, and unapologetically loud. 

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.

Can you be queer, African, and Christian - all at once?

In the first ever episode of Rigour & Flow, Aiwan reflects on the five-year anniversary of her documentary Kenyan, Christian, Queer - a powerful film about LGBTQ+ life, faith, and resistance in Africa. She and Tamanda dive deep into the complexities of reconciling Africanness, Christianity, and queerness - both in their own lives and through the communities that shaped them.

From Black Pentecostal fire and brimstone to silent Quaker pews, from passing privilege to bisexual indecision, from heartbreak to deep affirmation - this episode is a reckoning with religion, identity, and the power of seeing all of yourself.

We ask: Can faith and queerness truly coexist - or are they always at odds?

💬 Featuring reflections on:

– The making of Kenyan, Christian, Queer

– Black queer Pentecostalism in Kenya

– Internalised homophobia and healing

– House of Rainbow and Reverend Jide

– The Faith & Belief Forum’s work at the intersection of sexuality and religion

🎙 Rigour & Flow is a podcast where we make space to do the work, feel the feels, and stay in our flow.

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.

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 business, making creative work that matters, and navigating research with integrity.

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

Welcome to Rigour and Flow!

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.