The Great Reshuffling
| When: | Friday, 02 August 2024 - Friday, 02 August 2024 |
| Where: | Hybrid Event SCIS Seminar Room, North Lodge, Parktown Management Campus, 2 St David's Place, Parktown |
| Start time: | 9:00 |
| Enquiries: | katrina.lehmann-grube@wits.ac.za
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| RSVP: |
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| Cost: | Free but registration is required. |
SCIS invites you to a seminar with Prof. David Hughes titled The Great Reshuffling on 2 August 2024, 09:00 - 10:30 (SAST).
The Southern Centre for Inequality Studies invites you to a hybrid seminar with Professor David McDermott Hughes titled The Great Reshuffling on 2 August 2024, 09:00 - 10:30 (SAST).
Abstract:
The Global North should brace for a demographic and cartographic reshuffling. The current trajectory of climate and fossil fuels may render much of the Global South uninhabitable. Heat waves, combined with political collapse and economic inequality, are already driving people across the sea and desert. Migrants are also crossing borders – with a high death toll. What would it take to remove those international boundaries and the entire system of exclusion and xenophobia underwriting them? The very question seems quixotic. But what is necessary must be possible, at least to imagine. David Hughes imagines a right of free passage independent of territory – and against the grain of nationalism, sovereignty, and indigenous entitlements. He will draw upon ethnography conducted on the Zimbabwe-Mozambique border (in the 1990s) and on the Spain-Morocco border (in the 2010s). In both places, hosts incorporated migrants with care and at the bottom of social hierarchies. There is no utopia here: the great reshuffling will revive archaic forms of domination and servitude from local to planetary scales. Even so, reshuffling beats is surely preferable to suffering in place.
About the speaker:
David Hughes is a Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University. He has worked as an activist scholar of race, inequality, and natural resources since the late 1980s. In southern Africa, he worked for a variety of NGOs and wrote ethnographies of settler colonialism and land reform: From Enslavement to Environmentalism (2007) and Whiteness in Zimbabwe (2010). Then, in Trinidad and Tobago, he carried out ethnography on petroleum geologists, publishing Energy without Conscience (2017). His fourth book, Who Owns the Wind?, proposes a post-oil energy transition more just than the current one (not) taking place. Hughes has served as president and chief negotiator of Rutgers AAUP-AFT, his faculty labour union. He currently serves on the Climate Justice Task Force of the American Federation of Teachers.
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