Spring 2014

Among the most striking trends charted in the humanities in recent years has been the remarkable investment made in trying to understand modern capitalism. This conference seeks to profit from that boom by bringing together a range of scholars from the various disciplines that have developed novel methods for studying economic life: history, sociology, anthropology, science and technology studies, literary studies, as well as economics, accounting, and business studies. Please note: Seating is limited for this event.

Plants have been profoundly queer players in the modern project of describing "life" for ethical and political consideration. From their taxonomic destabilizations of colonial order in the eighteenth century to their current questionings concerning agency in recent posthumanist discourses, plants demand that we think about living, being, and becoming in ways that interrupt anthropocentric and heteronormative figurings of ethics, agency, futurity, and life in general.

In the popular mind, Africa exemplifies poverty. Media coverage focuses on destitution. Recent focus on a growing elite serves to emphasise the abject condition of the majority. This discourse depicts African poverty as timeless or as gripped in a worsening spiral. Africanist historians have long called for the historical study of the African poor with the argument that the most ‘useful’ or ‘usable’ aspect of African history could be to find solutions to poverty in Africa by developing historical understanding of the phenomenon.