After Decolonization? First Events

WiSER will be convening a set of intellectual discussions and interventions across the year on the theme of decolonization and the question of the future. We will do so in three clusters, with our fist cluster beginning in May. The fuller rationale for this project can be found here. Some of the sessions will be in-person in the WiSER seminar room, others will take place @WiSER online.

May 19

@WiSER online – 16:00 | Zoom Registration

Colonial Problems in Surveillance Studies

This panel examines a paradox that lurks in the recent global arguments that surveillance capitalism marks the adoption -- in the Anglophone North especially -- of colonial methods of value expropriation.  The same scholarship systematically ignores the actual conditions of knowledge production and state-building under colonialism, and afterwards, that are producing very powerful (and potentially dangerous) tools of automated assessment and tracking on the African and Asian continents.  Cláudio Muniz Machado Cavalcanti, Georges Eyenga, Zehra Hashmi and Tunde Okunoye will be in discussion with Keith Breckenridge on the geopolitics of surveillance capitalism.

June 7

1:00 - 2:10pm

Literary studies, decolonization and climate-transformed scholarship

What can literature and the humanities more generally bring to dual debates about decolonization and environmental crisis, via the question of water?  Through the launch of a special journal issue entitled “Reading for Water”, this session will demonstrate how literary studies can be deployed towards a climate-transformed and decolonized scholarship. Contributors Victoria Collis-Buthelezi, Nafisa Essop Sheik, Simon van Schalkwyk and Michael Titlestad will discuss the topic, in conversation with the editors Isabel Hofmeyr, Charne Lavery and Sarah Nuttall, followed by a round table discussion.