Past events
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Kevin Donovan (Edinburgh): The CEO’s Two Bodies: Corporate Personhood and the Corporate Persona in Kenya
15:00 - 17:00 3 February 2025
In July 2019, the CEO of Kenya’s largest company, Safaricom, died. This talk uses the funeral of Robert Collymore as a jumping off point to consider the curious personalisation of the abstraction called a corporation. In his near-decade at the helm, Collymore transformed Safaricom into a behemoth; he also emerged as a charismatic leader with...
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Omer Aijazi (Manchester). Atmospheric Violence: Disaster and Repair in Kashmir
15:00 - 17:00 10 February 2025
Atmospheric Violence explores how people in the militarized, ecologically fragile borderlands of Kashmir attempt to flourish in an environment where violence is everywhere, or atmospheric. Omer Aijazi takes us to remote mountainous valleys in the portion of Kashmir under Pakistan’s control, where life has been shaped by recurring environmental...
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Cecilia Vergnano (KU Leuven). Alpine Border Conflict: Migration and Social Polarization in the Everyday Life of Intra-EU Borders
15:00 - 17:00 17 February 2025
Since 2015, the reintroduction of (racialised) border controls within the supposedly border-free Schengen area and, in particular, at northern Italian borders – envisaged to contain asylum seekers’ so-called “secondary movements” within the EU – gave rise to uncountable migrants’ deaths at intra-EU borders (as well as unquantifiable...
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Deana Jovanovic (Utrecht University). Staging the Promises: Everyday Future-Making in a Serbian Industrial Town
15:00 - 17:00 24 February 2025
This seminar explores the temporal, political and economic effects of theatrically performed promises of aspirational futures, staged in a Serbian industrial town. Based on a decade-long ethnographic fieldwork among the residents who navigated the remnants of Yugoslav prosperity and the struggles of post-socialist decline, the talk will delve into...
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Emma Crewe (SOAS). Strategic Ignorance, Forgetting and Misrecognition in Parliaments
15:00 - 17:00 3 March 2025
Are parliaments past their heyday or have they never had one? Elected representatives claim to represent our interests, for which they need to know what we need or want, and knowledge brokerage is key to their political work. But obviously this is never a politically neutral activity. Hierarchies of knowledge in Parliament emerge out of socio-political...
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