Seminars

This seminar will be held on-line as an experimental Zoom seminar :  register here.

In the aftermath of the Angola's twenty-seven year civil war, the Angolan state launched a countrywide 'national reconstruction' programme, investing in large-scale infrastructure and housing as a means, it claimed, of stabilising the economy and reversing the worst material effects o

This paper is a work in progress. I offer an ethnographic account of everyday encounters with the state in Cameroon that, following Harold D. Lasswell, I describe as a garrison state.

The chapter is part of my forthcoming book A Dam for Africa: The Volta River Project and Modernization in Ghana (Indiana University Press), which explores the history of the Akosombo Dam, the country’s largest development project, completed in 1965.

Debt cancellation and land redistribution were not just demands of revolutionary movements in ancient times. In South Africa redistribution of land is at the heart of contemporary activism, enlivened by recent moves towards a new Expropriation Bill.

Historians of medicine in South Africa have demonstrated that in the late 19th and 20th centuries instances of South African medical research and clinical innovation gained global recognition, notably in malaria and tuberculosis work; in malnutrition and breastfeeding studies; in emergency medici

This paper investigates, theorises and seeks to understand the movement of womxn in and around Johannesburg—interrogating the politics of gender and sexuality as it relates to migration and mobility.

Dambudzo Marechera’s writings are central to an understanding of Zimbabwe’s turbulent history. And often he is systematically dismissed.

My concern here is a small, but important slice of the South African Anthropocene: the undermining, by coal mining, of the sub-surface of Sasolburg, the South African company town set up in the 1950s by the apartheid state.

Today the idea of environmental architecture is typically associated with ecological sustainability.

The interior décor trends ‘colonial chic’ and ‘safari chic’ started gaining popularity in the United States and Great Britain during the 1980s.

NWFZs are a firm feature of the global nuclear political landscape, affecting territories from Africa to Latin America, and from the South Pacific to Southeast Asia. Yet traditional and critical scholars alike have under-valued the importance of this occurrence.

In this talk, I argue that the psychoanalytic concepts of shame and envy—when framed at the societal level—are not only among the principal drivers of violence in South Africa, they are also responses to violence in the broadest sense of the term, that is, violence understood as &ldqu

The global rise of Pentecostalism and other relatively charismatic forms of Christianity has prompted extensive commentary in the social sciences, whether through the lens of syncretic cultural practice, psychological experiences of transcendence, or the socioeconomic logics of millennial capital

The transition in South Africa from apartheid to a constitutional democracy with equal rights for all has been described and celebrated in innumerable accounts. The best overview is probably Patti Waldmeir’s, Anatomy of a Miracle.

This paper argues that botanical garden should be reframed as social gardens.

Under the emergence of modernity, captivity, or more precisely, its dynamic traces a living experience of the new; the production or invention of the americas as the new.

How was pain understood in the 1970s? ...