Emma Dabiri

Join us to discuss an unmissable, radical essay from Emma Dabiri, bestselling author of Don't Touch My Hair and What White People Can Do Next.

What part of your beautiful self were you taught to hate? We spend a lot of time trying to improve our 'defects', according to society's ideals of beauty. But these ideals are often reductive, tyrannical, and commercially entangled, imposed upon us by oppressive systems and further strengthened by our conditioned self-loathing.

This book encourages unruliness, exploring the ways in which we can rebel against and subvert the current system. Offering alternative ways of seeing beauty, drawing on other cultures, worldviews, times, and places, as well as looking beyond the capitalist model - to reconnect with our birth right and find the inherent joy in our disobedient bodies.

It accompanies The Cult of Beauty, a major exhibition at Wellcome Collection in autumn 2023.

Emma Dabiri spent over a decade as a teaching fellow in the African department at SOAS. She is a final year Visual Sociology PhD researcher at Goldsmiths. She has presented several television and radio programmes including BBC Radio 4's critically-acclaimed documentaries 'Journeys into Afro-futurism' and 'Britain's Lost Masterpieces' and the Cannes Silver Lion award winning Hair Power for Channel 4. She is a Contributing Editor at Elle and runs the Instagram account, Disobedient Bodies.

Emma will be in conversation with Salma El-Wardany, an accomplished author, poet, and BBC radio presenter. Salma has delivered two TEDx talks, performs and speaks globally and her debut novel, These Impossible Things, was chosen as a book club pick for the Today Show in America. Her debut is now out in paperback and has been critically received in both the US, and UK.