JCU Events

Seminar Presented by Harvard University Professor Jean Comaroff

Prof Jean Cornaroff, the Alfred North Whitehead Professor of African and African American Studies and Anthropology at Harvard University, is presenting at JCU Cairns on 27 November 2019.

Postgraduate Workshop for CASE students

12:00 pm - 4:00 pm

Open to all CASE postgraduate students, this workshop will reflect on the possibilities and problematics of engaged scholarship in the greater postcolonial world, and on the relations between theory and practice in anthropology, and other cognate disciplines (e.g. all those in the social sciences and humanities at JCU).

Public Lecture

5:00 pm - 6:00 pm

Concern has been steadily mounting across the globe that wage work, as we have long known it, is disappearing. Yet there is little agreement about how, why, where, or in what measure. Or what might take its place in the future. Why do we – scholars, politicians, people at large – seem unable to think beyond a universe founded on mass employment?

About Prof Jean Comaroff

Prof Jean Comaroff is the Alfred North Whitehead Professor of African and African American Studies and Anthropology at Harvard University, and Honorary Professor at the University of Cape Town. She was educated at the University of Cape Town and the London School of Economics. Until 2012, she was the Bernard E. and Ellen C. Sunny Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology, and Director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory. Her research, primarily conducted in southern Africa, has focused on the interplay of capitalism, modernity, and colonialism, the politics of knowledge and the nature of sovereignty, and theorizing the contemporary world from beyond its centres. Her writing has covered a range of more specific topics: religion and ritual, medicine and magic, law, and crime, democracy and difference. Publications include Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People (1985), “Beyond the Politics of Bare Life: AIDS and the Global Order” (2007); and, with John L. Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution (vols. l [1991] and ll [1997]); Ethnography and the Historical Imagination (1992); Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism (2000),  Law and Disorder in the Postcolony (2006), Ethnicity, Inc. (2009),Theory from the South, or How Euro-America is Evolving Toward Africa (2011), The Truth About Crime: Sovereignty, Knowledge, Social Order (2016) and The Politics of Custom: Chiefship, Capital, and the State in Contemporary Africa (2018).