In conversation with Neema Githere

Monday, March 25, 2021 | 8pm EST
Canada

According to the Islamic mystical tradition of Sufism, Radical Love manifests inwardly as tenderness, and outwardly as justice. This keynote explores the ways in which this radical love emerges as technology — a purposeful, solution-oriented application of care — and invites participants to theorize what love-technologies could pave the way for a sustainable, mutually-assistive future.

Taking the form of a multimedia love letter, this presentation draws from the work of Black feminist scholars such as Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Octavia Butler, together with disability justice theorists such as Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, to reflect upon how love makes life more survivable for people living at the margins.

Using their own relationships and matrices of support as a departure point, Neema will explore how Radical Love emerges as a technology of survival and abundance.

What does it look like for us to transform communities through a technology of love — love as a verb?

The keynote will be followed by a Q&A with Neema Githere moderated by nènè myriam konaté.

Partners

Presenter
Neema Githere

is a guerrilla theorist and curator hailing from Nairobi, Kenya whose work explores Indigenous cybernetics and love as a method of transportation. Neema’s experimental practice, termed ‘data healing,’ seeks to illuminate the links between technology, nature, and spirituality to investigate how working from this intersection can combat the data trauma – a term coined by Olivia M. Ross – that saturates our virtual worlds. Other projects of Neema’s include Afropresentism, a term they coined in 2017 to articulate digital diasporic cultural production in the here and now, and Radical Love Consciousness, a collective that focuses on re-indigenization through grassroots learning networks.

Moderator
Nènè Myriam Konaté

is a child of ayiti and mali’s diasporas living in tio’tia:ke/mooniyang. their transdisciplinary practice is concerned with care, somatic knowledge(s) and storytelling. their work delves into the discomfort we experience when moving through fear — toward desire. through dialogue-based interventions, nènè invites us to consider incongruities between the futurities we seek in order to shatter illusions of harmony and hold space for divergence.

min Canada

2021