The 2024/2025 Flatley Lecture will be delivered by broadcaster and writer Emma Dabiri.

Dabiri's research has examined the construction of racial categories, not only the ideological and economic functions served by their invention but moreover the logic they represent as well as the ontological orientations they are demonstrative of (the racial categories black and white as we use them today were popularized and legilsated in the early period of the transatlantic slave trade). They are the product of a world view organized around oppositional, hierarchical binaries and rigid systems of categorization that position both 'black' and 'white' in opposition to one another.

This talk compares Yourba and Irish ontologies to discuss the Irish language conceptualization of duine gorm - 'blue person' - a term used to describe people racialized as Black individuals as Gaeilge. Treating this idiom not simply as a reference to a primary color, but rather as something more poetic, Dabiri's lecture explores the decolonial possibilities of thinking about difference outside the violent taxonomy of race.

Emma Dabiri FRSL is an award-winning (Cannes Lion, Gold Medal of Honorary Patronage University Philosophical Society and Praeses Elite Award (2023)) broadcaster and Sunday Times best-selling author of Don't Touch My Hair, What White People Can Do Next and Disobedient Bodies. She spent over a decade as a teaching fellow in the African department of SOAS University of London. In 2022, she was appointed Heimbold Chair of Irish Studies at Villanova University in Pennsylvania. Emma is a Contributing Editor at ELLEUK and a columnist at The Guardian. She has presented numerous history, arts and culture series on both TV and radio, including Journeys into Afrofuturism, BBC's Back in Time, and Britain's Lost Masterpieces.