Seminars

Twilight governance: local power, politics and participation in Luanda

Monday, 7 March, 2022 - 16:00
Presented by: 
Sylvia
Croese

In this presentation I will provide an outline of the main arguments of the book project that is currently under contract with Wiley Blackwell, as part of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research Studies in Urban and Social Change series.

Revolutionary mathematics : risk, class and the financial overthrow of mining capitalism

Monday, 28 February, 2022 - 16:00
Presented by: 
Keith
Breckenridge

This paper is an attempt to account for the ascendancy of finance in the South African economy, and the collapse of gold mining.   It emphasises the contest between the derivatives markets that were nurtured by the Black-Scholes-Merton formula, and the Bretton Woods gold standard, both

The Colour of Inequality in South Africa and Brazil: Making Sense of Transformative Social Policy.

Monday, 22 November, 2021 - 16:00
Presented by: 
Madalitso
Phiri

South Africa’s and Brazil’s social policy architectures attempt to address the residues of institutional poverty, inequality, and unemployment.

What is degradation?

Monday, 15 November, 2021 - 16:00
Presented by: 
Meredith
Root-Bernstein

In this presentation I challenge the widespread notion that environmental degradation is an ecological state.

Grounding the paradox of cohesion and contestation in public space

Monday, 8 November, 2021 - 16:00
Presented by: 
Temba
Carmel
Middelmann &
Rawhani

Assumptions surrounding public space and norms in Johannesburg’s public space management and policies appear to be based on core aims such as inclusivity and justice which ultimately aspire to social cohesion.

Experts of the Surface and Underground: Cartography and Geological Knowledge in the Territorial Construction of the Witbank Labour District, c. 1899-1930s

Monday, 25 October, 2021 - 16:00
Presented by: 
Irvin Sifiso
Jiyane
The development of the Witbank coal area has been explained by historians and other scholars in terms of environmental exploitation, its railway connectivity to the Witwatersrand, and the availability of cheap and strictly controlled African labour.

Magic mountain: ‘The ancestors cannot be relocated’

Monday, 18 October, 2021 - 16:00
Presented by: 
David
Kearabetswe
Coplan &
Moopelo

Abstract The recognition of African ‘traditional’ or ‘customary’ law and its ideological elevation to a status that in principle equals that of the written, legislative South African legal code has provided professional opportunities for anthropologists.

(Hetero)Topologies of an Eastern Cape Province Nature Reserve

Monday, 11 October, 2021 - 16:00
Presented by: 
James
Merron

This paper is about the relationship between aerial photography and ground surveys in terms of space making in South Africa.

Planetary forests: Remote sensing, field sciences and carbon markets in Central Africa

Monday, 4 October, 2021 - 16:00
Presented by: 
Véra
Ehrenstein

This paper is a work in progress. It is about how the climate crisis puts the central African forests centre stage.

Laboring for whiteness: The rise of Trumpism and what it tells us about racial and gendered capitalism in the United States

Monday, 27 September, 2021 - 16:00
Presented by: 
Jeff
Maskovsky

This talk explores the ways that whiteness and paternalism work to categorize labor in the 21st century United States.

The Troubled Promised Land: Political Theology in South Sudan

Monday, 13 September, 2021 - 16:00
Presented by: 
Christopher
Tounsel
This chapter begins with a description of developments in South Sudan since the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CpA). Division and enmity between southern factions persisted during the postwar years, and independence

Animist Eco-logics: The Speculative Ecosystems of Amos Tutuola

Monday, 6 September, 2021 - 16:00
Presented by: 
Kirk
Sides
This paper looks at the work of Nigerian author Amos Tutuola arguing that Tutuola’s first works, The Palmwine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, inaugurate a negotiation over which poetics and politics were best suited to imagine and thus write a post-colonial future.

The Formulation of the 'Coloured Question' (1932-1950)

Monday, 30 August, 2021 - 16:00
Presented by: 
Janeke
Thumbran

This paper examines how the ‘coloured question’ was initially formulated through the biological essence that underpinned this racial category.

From travel to arrival: mapping intersectionality’s landings in the Global South 

Monday, 23 August, 2021 - 16:00
Presented by: 
Srila
Roy

This paper briefly reflects on intersectionality’s travels to two distinct locales in the Global South, India and South Africa, where it has been enthusiastically taken up by academics and activists alike.

Rhodes, violence and the statue at Oriel College, Oxford

Monday, 2 August, 2021 - 16:00
Presented by: 
William
Beinart

This is an abstract of the historical appendix to the commission appointed by Oriel College to discuss the Rhodes legacy, which I would like to make the basis of the discussion.

Exploring Omeka S for Digital Cultural Heritage

Monday, 28 June, 2021 - 12:00
Please distribute widely.  There is no cost to participants. 

Criminal Faces: Beauty, Race and Criminality in Western Thought and the Development of Digital Profiling

Monday, 21 June, 2021 - 16:00
Presented by: 
Edward
Higgs

Artificial intelligence systems are being developed to identify known ‘criminals’ through facial recognition profiling, and also to identify criminal physiognomies of those considered to be potential criminals.

The Labour-drug Question in precarious times: The rise of Heroin and Xanax

Monday, 14 June, 2021 - 16:00
Presented by: 
Mark
Hunter

A considerable amount of research shows that drugs in colonial settings drew groups into relations of dependence—that is, they acted as ‘labour inducers’ and ‘labour enhancers’ in the words of Jankowiak and Bradburd.

‘Interlocking Transactions’: Micro-foundations for ‘Racial Capitalism’

Monday, 7 June, 2021 - 16:00
Presented by: 
Sharad
Chari

This is a draft chapter for a book edited by me, Melanie Samson and Mark Hunter, celebrating the work of Gillian Hart.

The Impasses of Politics: Sexual Violence and the ANC in Exile

Monday, 31 May, 2021 - 16:00
Presented by: 
Rachel
Sandwell

In the late 1990s, as the hearings of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) began, stories of past abuse, including sexual violence, within the exiled camps of the African National Congress (ANC) emerged.

Fostering Decoloniality in Music: From Local Archives to Global Dialogue

Monday, 24 May, 2021 - 16:00
Presented by: 
Lindelwa
Dalamba

Presented by Lindelwa Dalamba, Philip Burnett, Roe-Min Kok and Yvonne Liao

Modernist/Modernising South Africa

Monday, 17 May, 2021 - 15:00
Presented by: 
Stephen
Sparks

[Please note the unusual time for this event.]

The Long Road to Compensation for Silicosis Sufferers in South Africa

Monday, 10 May, 2021 - 16:00
Presented by: 
Albert
Mushai

Silicosis has troubled the South African mining industry since the 1880s. Since 1902, several commissions of inquiry have investigated this problem but none of them recommended common-law liability as an appropriate mechanism for compensating victims.

The New Religious Political Right in South Africa

Monday, 12 April, 2021 - 16:00
Presented by: 
Siphiwe
Dube

This paper traces the genealogy of the New Right from its earlier inception in the late 1980s and early 1990s, unravelling the core features of the 'New Right' that can be demonstrated to be relevant for current day South Africa.

What we can learn from the data about metropolitan political economies?

Monday, 29 March, 2021 - 16:00
Presented by: 
Crispian
Olver

The presentation, examining the economic and infrastructural performance of Cape Town, Johannesburg and Nelson Mandela Bay will refer to the data in the attached slides.

Freedom, Property and Markets

Tuesday, 23 March, 2021 - 16:00
Presented by: 
Lucy
Allais

Kant’s political philosophy is based on freedom; chapter 1 of part 1 of the text concerns private property rights. What is the relation between these?

Potential History - Unlearning Imperialism

Monday, 15 March, 2021 - 16:00
Presented by: 
Ariella Aïsha
Azoulay
This seminar has been cancelled, and will be rescheduled later in the year.

Please read the following three, short texts in preparation for the seminar.

Book discussion of The Fixer : Visa Lottery Chronicles

Monday, 8 March, 2021 - 16:00
Presented by: 
Charlie
Piot

Please read pp1 - 35 of the open access version of The Fixer : Visa Lottery Chronicles at https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/24897

Ibn Rushd’s _The Decisive Treatise_: A Text for Political Reform

Monday, 2 November, 2020 - 16:00
Presented by: 
Ayesha
Omar

Ibn Rushd’s the Decisive Treatise (1126–98) is widely acknowledged as an important text for understanding his legal ideas, with some scholars describing this text as a legal opinion (fatwa) issued for the Malikite jurists of that period.

Landscapes of peripheral and displaced urbanisms

Monday, 26 October, 2020 - 16:00
Presented by: 
Ngaka
Mosiane

This paper examines the ways in which the people of northern Tshwane mediate their exclusions through engaging with the Mabopane Station to reach different places and to carry out socio-economic activities at the Station itself.

Living Together: The ANC, the Soviet Union, and the National Question.

Monday, 19 October, 2020 - 16:00
Presented by: 
Hilary
Lynd

This paper takes a fresh look at the relationship between the ANC and the Soviet Union, using archival records, interviews, and memoirs from both South Africa and Russia.

Critically Engaged Sociology at SWOP : Four decades of South/North concept formation

Monday, 12 October, 2020 - 16:00
Presented by: 
Karl
von Holdt

Much of the literature on the political engagements of sociologists has been framed by Michael Burawoy’s concept of ‘public sociology’.

South Africa and the Neoliberals

Monday, 5 October, 2020 - 16:00
Presented by: 
Quinn
Slobodian

From the 1960s to the present, South Africa offered a site for neoliberals to think through the conditions necessary to preserve the market order, especially under conditions of what they perceived as the problem of white minority and even white decline.

Metabolic drift? food, fertiliser and the biology of history in Malawi

Monday, 21 September, 2020 - 16:00
Presented by: 
Megan
Vaughan

This paper is a work-in-progress. It arises from a larger study of what the medical literature labels “metabolic disorders” in different African sites that has expanded into a consideration of metabolic systems as social as well as biological phenomena.

Rereading Stuart Hall on Race

Monday, 14 September, 2020 - 16:00
Presented by: 
Paul
Gilroy

 

 

Just Health? : Law, Constitutionalism and Postcolonial Dis-ease

Monday, 7 September, 2020 - 16:00
Presented by: 
Kaushik
Sunder Rajan

In this paper, I outline a certain landscape of the judicialization of health in South Africa. The “judicialization of health” refers to ways in which claims to health are made through the law (Biehl and Petryna 2011).

After Labor

Monday, 24 August, 2020 - 16:00
Presented by: 
Jean
Comaroff

Wage work, it is said, is disappearing in the “ new ” age of capital, to rising alarm across the world. Yet there is little agreement about why, where, or in what measure. Or what might take its place in the fore- seeable future.

Building National Universities and Making Human Resources in Southeastern Africa

Monday, 17 August, 2020 - 16:00
Presented by: 
Priya
Lal
This paper examines the formation and early development of the University of Dar es Salaam and the University of Zambia in relation to the larger project of producing a professional workforce for nation building in Tanzania and Zambia.

From the Plantation to the Fourth Industrial Revolution: Other Economic Geographies

Monday, 27 July, 2020 - 16:00
Presented by: 
Stefan
Ouma

As part of a larger project on a global history and critique of “efficiency”, in this presentation I argue that the plantation constitutes a model of “development” that still haunts us.

Protect the poor but don’t meddle with those who can pay: Debating solidarity in the context of the NHI

Monday, 25 May, 2020 - 15:00
Presented by: 
Lauren
Paremoer

This paper examines ideas about solidarity that have been generated by the South African government’s proposals to create a National Health Insurance (NHI) Fund.

Contemporary Speculative Fiction in Southern Africa

Monday, 18 May, 2020 - 16:00
Presented by: 
Joanna
Woods

Speculative fiction is one of the most diverse and complex genres of African literature today. Its contributors come from all across Sub-Saharan Africa, and the range of topic covered is astounding.

International actors and social protection in Africa, 2000-2020

Monday, 11 May, 2020 - 16:00
Presented by: 
Jeremy
Seekings

Whilst social protection policy has long been shaped and sometimes driven by international or transnational actors, in the 2000s these actors assumed new importance.

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