Looking for love: an inter(-sectional dys-)course

Invited, in progress. Applying the big-picture and risk-taking approaches of neurodivergence, I cultivate creative interventions to catalyse conversation and action towards dismantling (neuro-)normative, colonialist and other harmful cultures and structures. Love is the subject, method and proposed outcome of my current creative research programme Looking for Love, 2024-2029, and this new diagram is part of this endeavour. Drawing on and extending findings from my book, Neuro-Futurism &amp; Re-Imagining Leadership: An A-Z For Collective Liberation (Palgrave MacMillan 2024), including the introduction of ‘monster-mapping’ as a creative strategy of ‘way-finding and re-direction during and beyond crisis’ (Tan 2024), I will create a new diagram to articulate a creative, decolonial, neuroqueered practice of intimacy. <br/><br/>The title reflects the playfulness of my approach, as well as how my discussion is anchored in an intersectional, tentacular prism, and draws on my discussions of ‘discourse’ — and knowledge-making as necessarily embodied, dynamic, creative mobilities process. The diagram will reference how marginalised culture workers have discussed love such as Baldwin, hooks, Lorde, Friere et al. I will also discuss and extend past explorations such as Hinder (a dating app which encourages inter-species entanglement) and Speed-Dates (eg with neuro-queering proponent Nick Walker 2023 and artist Bob and Roberta Smith in How to Thrive in 2050!, BBC Culture in Quarantine 2021, and the public in an exhibition-cum-performance on a ‘Neuro-futuristic 2050’ at Attenborough Arts Centre 2022).