strategist, advisor + writer
diagnosing, dreaming, and doing. mostly Being.
At Brightkey, we connect mission-aligned capital to pioneers who are imagining human and planetary flourishing over a 100+ year horizon.
I help leaders (and their teams) build holistic resilience.
I advise institutions on culture and write about imagining otherwise.
Selected Talks
Beyond Effect:
Affective Wisdom for Uncertain Times.
How can we imagine (re-imagine) what we have come to understand about emotions as they relate to emerging technologies? Can we reorient them from the margins of technology design, development and research? What would emerge if we started with feelings as a guide? Which kinds of adaptive, intuitive guidance systems might we build? How could they help support collective harmony during, despite and beyond uncertainty?
Conversation with Joy White, author of “Terraformed: Young Black Lives in the Inner City”
Since the 1980s, austerity, gentrification and structural racism have wreaked havoc on inner-city communities, widening inequality and entrenching poverty.
In Terraformed, Joy White offers an insider ethnography of Forest Gate — a neighbourhood in Newham, east London — analysing how these issues affect the black youth of today. Connecting the dots between music, politics and the built environment, it centres the lived experiences of black youth who have had it all: huge student debt, invisible homelessness, custodial sentences, electronic tagging, surveillance, arrest, ASBOs, issues with health and well-being, and of course, loss.
Part ethnography, part memoir, Terraformed contextualises the history of Newham and considers how young black lives are affected by racism, neoliberalism and austerity.
Selected Writing
Working through Uncertainty with Rana Begum and Idris Khan.
“Begum and Khan’s works push the limits of two- and three-dimensional space, offering perspectives that remain attentive to the vastness of internal feeling, feelings that yearn for expression in form, even when those forms are contained.”
Khadija Saye’s Reflections on Spirituality in the African Diaspora
Malidoma Patrice Somé, in Ritual: Power, Healing and Community (1993), beautifully captures the urgency of collectively breathing through the pain and transforming suffering into something else: ‘We need ritual because it is an expression of the fact that we recognize the difficulty of creating a different and special kind of community. A community that doesn’t have a ritual cannot exist.’ Breathwork is critical, Saye reminds us. In the space between mourning and remembrance, we find belonging; rituals ground us and offer a home for the radical yearning Saye’s work explores. We find ourselves, and each other, between these deep breaths.
“So, the effect is that the apt frustrations of protestors are simultaneously diluted, rejected, gaslit and made royally relevant for the purposes of this newly centralized Englishness where everyone can protest – but no one ought to.”
— In conversation with Derica Shields and Mimi Chu discussing the new Police & Crime Bill
Trap Visionary: Clash Meets Rico Nasty
Rico Nasty cares about her audience. “I’ve never had a fan make me feel uncomfortable,” she promises. “I feel like we could be friends!” None of the often-disparaging associations some corners of Twitter has about SoundCloud stick; “I’ve always had hella love for SoundCloud,” she explains. Rico’s fans, her hardcore Stans, however, come from YouTube, which she prides herself on.
“I like fashion, I like visuals, playing with eyes,” she continues, referring to the trompe l’oeil on her debut album cover where her hair is styled into the surname of her moniker. A consistent theme in her visual grammar is a surreal and almost psychedelic aesthetic that hints at influences from punk and grunge whilst staying firmly rooted in the trap arena.