SOAS Inaugural Lecture: Professors Catherine Dolan & Michael Charney

Join us to celebrate a special milestone for our new professors and hear about their innovative research. Doors for this event will open on 5:45 PM with the lectures to commence at 6PM. A post drinks reception will be held at 7:15 PM immediately after the lecture.

Lecture title: When Ethical Capitalism Travels: Social Relations and Material Lives in East Africa.
Lecture abstract: In recent decades, ethical capitalism has emerged as a powerful moral injunction, promising to reconcile profit and principles in global supply chains. But what happens when ethical regimes - from sustainability certifications to inclusive markets - travel across contexts and scales? Drawing on ethnographic research in East Africa, this lecture traces how diverse forms of ethical capitalism are translated, negotiated, and contested in practice, both reshaping and at times disrupting the social relations and material lives of those they seek to benefit.

Lecture title: Re-Staking “Burma’s” History: the African and Black American ‘Burma” Experience in the First Half of the Twentieth Century.
Lecture abstract: Significant attention has been directed at Area Studies in recent years as a neo-colonial framework that locks in place a hegemonic Western knowledge regime inherited from the colonial period. More practically, the current configuration of Area Studies has made it difficult to measure development or to understand history in non-western societies in any way other than by comparison to the West. But nationalising our historical frameworks is no less blinding. Embracing rather than abandoning these loaded frameworks can help to reveal the very intimate relationship Africa, Africans, and African Americans had with Burma over the course of the twentieth century, particularly from the 1940s and the impact Burma has had on shaping historical memory in Africa since. This presentation examines this history, why it is the most forgotten of “forgotten histories” of Burma, and why remembering Burma's past should be important to a larger global audience. Understanding Burma through African (and African American) eyes rather than through those of the West, South Asia, or just the Burmese reveals a more diverse panoply of constructions of Burma on horizontal rather than vertical terms, exposing not only the fragility of Western framed Area Studies but also it’s advantages, helping to facilitate rather than to obfuscate the potential to decolonise knowledge about the country’s past.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

SOAS Gallery Lecture Theatre, Russell Square, London, United Kingdom

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