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PODCAST

Rigour & Flow with Aiwan and Tamanda

Rigour & Flow with Aiwan and Tamanda

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

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All Episodes

27:13

The Future of Rigour & Flow: Seasonal Shifts and...

Rigour & Flow with Aiwan and Tamanda ·

2026/04/07

Rigour & Flow is evolving. After a full year of weekly episodes, we are moving to a Seasonal rhythm starting with Season 5 this May.In this intimate update, we reflect on our first year through the lens of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dream Count and our own personal Easter Monday reflections. We’re sharing the "why" behind our move to seasons, what the data from Year 1 told us, and a preview of the incredible conversations we’ve already recorded for the new season. Stay tuned for a feedwarmer

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49:40

Podcasting Is Easy… Until You Try It | Learnings From...

Rigour & Flow with Aiwan and Tamanda ·

2026/03/31

Everyone has a podcast. But very few people sustain one.In this final episode of Season 4, we mark one year of Rigour & Flow - a milestone that feels both significant and, at times, improbable. Because behind the weekly releases, the conversations and the growth, there have also been moments of doubt, exhaustion, and the very real question of whether we could keep going.We reflect on what it actually takes to build and sustain an independent podcast. Not just creatively, but emotionally,

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1:07:33

Can You Trust Podcasts? | Power, Women & the Manosphere

Rigour & Flow with Aiwan and Tamanda ·

2026/03/24

Podcasting is shaping politics. But who controls the mic and who gets left out? In this episode, we turn the mic on the podcasting industry itself.We start with Aiwan’s journey into podcasting, from the early iTunes and RSS era to producing shows professionally and use that to ask what makes podcasting so different from film, television and music.What emerges is a picture of a medium that still feels young, unstable and oddly opaque: open source, easy to access, but thin on shared standards,

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59:51

Is Marriage Sex Work? | Power, Morality & the Myth of...

Rigour & Flow with Aiwan and Tamanda ·

2026/03/17

Fromsex work in Georgian England to modern debates on marriage, consent and criminalisation, this episode of Rigour & Flow focuses on women’s perspectives on power, survival and who gets to define respectability.We start by discussing the historical drama Harlots, a series set in 18th-century London that centres the lives of women working in the sex trade. Written by women, the show offers a refreshing lens on the world’s “oldest profession.” Instead of caricatures or moral judgement, we see the

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1:04:49

Would You Want to Live in a Matriarchy? | Power,...

Rigour & Flow with Aiwan and Tamanda ·

2026/03/10

It’s International Women’s Month. So what better time to ask: what would society look like if women were truly prioritised? In this week’s episode of Rigour & Flow, we explore the idea of matriarchy - not as a fantasy of female domination, but as a thought experiment about power, care and social priorities. We begin with the plot of a recent series we watched: ‘The Power’. Teenage girls develop the ability to emit electric shocks. “Everything is getting zapped.” Overnight, hierarchies

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1:09:19

Was I the Toxic Friend? | Adult Friendship &...

Rigour & Flow with Aiwan and Tamanda ·

2026/03/03

Last week, we told the story of friendship rupture. But what happens when the mirror turns around?In Part 2 of our adult friendship series, we step into uncomfortable territory: the moments where we may have been the difficult one. The one who ghosted. The one who didn’t communicate. The one who hurt someone we loved. This episode moves beyond betrayal and jealousy to something quieter and harder - accountability.We begin with conditioning. Aiwan reflects on growing up in a high-control Pentecostal

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1:00:33

When Your Best Friend Resents You | Adult Friendship...

Rigour & Flow with Aiwan and Tamanda ·

2026/02/24

Where do you stand on choosing to fix a failing friendship, or deciding to let it go?Adult friendships are supposed to be the easy relationships. No shared mortgage. No in-laws. No vows. Why then can theybreak you in ways that feel like such a fundamental failure?In this episode of Rigour & Flow, we open a conversation that surprised us both. Using a provocation from Lovette Jallow on friendship breakups and “outgrowing” people, we ask whether growth always calls for departure, or whether

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58:28

Silence and Shame: Sexual Violence and the...

Rigour & Flow with Aiwan and Tamanda ·

2026/02/17

Many of us learned very young that sexual violence is “unsayable”. That naming it has consequences. In turn, sexual violence remains endemic, sustained by the silent treatment it is given, and by a society that tolerates such an insatiable appetite for violence without accountability.In this episode, we step into terrains of this damaging silence and ask who it protects, who it punishes, and what it costs to speak out.We begin with memory. Tamanda reflects on the moment she first encountered the

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52:35

Why Do Institutions Protect Perpetrators Over...

Rigour & Flow with Aiwan and Tamanda ·

2026/02/10

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

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54:55

Whitewashed Lecture Halls | African Knowledges and...

Rigour & Flow with Aiwan and Tamanda ·

2026/02/03

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

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1:31:45

Black Kids, White Classrooms: Black History Erasure,...

Rigour & Flow with Aiwan and Tamanda ·

2026/01/27

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

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58:32

“I’m Done Performing Productivity!” | Burnout, Worth...

Rigour & Flow with Aiwan and Tamanda ·

2026/01/20

New year energy is usually about what we are chasing next. In this episode of Rigour & Flow, we slow that impulse down and start 2026 by asking, “What are we leaving behind in 2025?”After an intense year of work, production, learning curves and hard lessons, we wanted something lighter for this conversation. The result is a mix of reflection and a lot of laughter, alongside some seriously important focus points as we step into the year ahead for Rigour & Flow, AiAi Studios, as well as Roots

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46:51

Snatched! | Behind the Scenes on RuPaul’s Drag Race...

Rigour & Flow with Aiwan and Tamanda ·

2026/01/13

In this Feedwarmer episode of Rigour & Flow, we spotlight a project from Aiwan’s back catalogue that brought her an enormous amount of joy to produce: Snatched! - the companion podcast celebrating all things RuPaul’s Drag Race.We open with a short preamble reflecting on why Snatched! mattered to AiAi Studios as a creative project - not just because of the joy and chaos of Drag Race, but as producers who care deeply about sound, pacing, playfulness, and permission to lean fully into camp, queer

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42:23

She Love Bombed the F*ck Out of Me: The...

Rigour & Flow with Aiwan and Tamanda ·

2026/01/06

In this Feedwarmer episode of Rigour & Flow, we spotlight a podcast that had us nodding, wincing, laughing, and quietly re-evaluating our own friendships.We open with a short preamble and reflections on adult friendship; the stories we tell ourselves about loyalty, closeness, and safety, and the moments when something starts to feel off but we can’t quite name why. From there, we introduce an episode of the Unapologetically Black Podcast that literally woke Tamanda up in the dead of night.Hosted

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27:22

What a Gold Medal Meant for Black Britain: Tessa...

Rigour & Flow with Aiwan and Tamanda ·

2025/12/30

In this Feedwarmer episode of Rigour & Flow, we share a moment of encounter: meeting sporting history in the flesh.The episode opens with us setting the scene at CLIMB 2025, where Aiwan attended a talk by Olympic gold medallist Tessa Sanderson and knew immediately she had to hear more. After that brief introduction, we move into a live conversation between Aiwan and Tessa, recorded at the AiAi Studios stand during the festival.Tessa Sanderson is the first Black British woman to win an Olympic

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48:57

Why We Love Reality TV: Unguilty Pleasures with Liv...

Rigour & Flow with Aiwan and Tamanda ·

2025/12/23

In this Feedwarmer episode, we spotlight one of our absolute favourite projects of 2025: Unguilty Pleasures - the Real Housewives–inspired podcast we launched this year as a collaboration between AiAi Studios and Daylight Productions.Hosted by Liv Little and Scarlett Curtis, Unguilty Pleasures is a joyful, self-aware ode to reality TV, escapism and the softer corners of culture we don’t always give ourselves permission to enjoy. From the chaotic brilliance of The Real Housewives to the emotional

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1:03:23

Why Are Mixed Race People Always Asked to Pick a Side?

Rigour & Flow with Aiwan and Tamanda ·

2025/12/16

We return to a conversation that never really settled.After the unexpected response to Season 2’s “Episode 19: Are Mixed Race People ‘Properly Black’?”, we sit with what lingered; the comments, the discomfort, the language policing, and the familiar demand that mixed race people either ‘pick a side’ or ‘play the bridge’.This isn’t a debate about identity labels. It’s a reflection on what mixedness is asked to do in a world structured by racial hierarchy.We begin with language: the push to abandon

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52:51

Healing, boundaries and borders: Mental health, money...

Rigour & Flow with Aiwan and Tamanda ·

2025/12/09

In this Notes from the Margins edition of Rigour & Flow, we follow three journeys that sit at the heart of Black life: how we heal, how we give, and how we move through a world that does not always want us in it.Tamanda opens with a little-known and astonishing history of mental health care in Nigeria. Long before global psychiatry learned to speak about community, Dr Thomas Adeoye Lambo pioneered a model that placed patients with local families, blended medical care with traditional healing,

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1:10:25

Pentecostalism & Zionism: Faith, Conditioning & the...

Rigour & Flow with Aiwan and Tamanda ·

2025/12/02

We step into the charged, intimate territory of religion, politics and the stories we were raised to believe, and ask how aspects of Pentecostal conditioning continue to shape how many of us understand Israel, Palestine, and the Middle East today.We begin with the lessons we absorbed long before we had language for them: Zion as a sacred homeland, Jews as “God’s chosen people,” Muslims as enemies in spiritual warfare, and Israel as a nation that could never be questioned without risking blasphemy

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1:11:17

‘Divorce is like death’: Leaving, grieving and...

Rigour & Flow with Aiwan and Tamanda ·

2025/11/25

Divorce is sheer grief. It pulls apart your routines, your identity and the story you believed you were living. In this episode of Rigour and Flow, we open up with one of our most private conversations.Tamanda shares the long road from confusion to clarity in her first marriage. She reflects on growing up with parents who modelled peace but not conflict, and how that silence left her without the tools to navigate a hint of difficulty in her own relationship. She talks about sexless partnership,

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