Postcards to the future: Struggles against anticipatory harm

Public Lecture sponsored by the King’s College Summer Residence on Equality, Law and Social Justice. Refreshments will be offered after the lecture.

Lecture title: Postcards to the future: Struggles against anticipatory harm

Speaker: Professor Shirin Rai is Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of Politics and International Studies, SOAS, University of London. She is currently working on a book Depletion: The costs of care and the struggles to reverse it.

Abstract: In this paper I explore the idea of depletion through social reproduction and anticipatory harm through examining the campaign of a community to protect its everyday way of life – the story of communities of the Xolobeni region in the Wild Coast region of South Africa, whose world is now threatened by mining. I explore how the threat to the environment of a community produces anxiety that is depleting, and how the community pushes back against this threat through law, social movement and individual engagement to generate a politics that aims to prevent, mitigate, replenish and transform social relations on the ground through imaginaries that are grounded in their histories and the current politics of South Africa.