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About this talk

Professor Catherine Dolan from the Department of Anthropology and Sociology and Professor Michael Charney from the Department of History deliver their inaugural lectures on two different and distinctive themes. Professor Dolan's inaugural lecture is titled 'When Ethical Capitalism Travels: Socialities, Subjectivities, and Material Lives in East Africa'. In recent decades, ethical capitalism, from sustainability certifications to inclusive markets, has emerged as a powerful moral injunction, promising to reconcile profit and principles in global supply chains. But what happens when ethical regimes 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. Professor Charney's inaugural lecture will be on 'The Rise, Decline, and Reimagining of Area Studies and "Southeast Asia"'. The epistemic boundaries of area studies have always been porous, shaped by colonial encounters, missionary linguistics, and the transnational circulation of scholars and texts. What has changed, and the direction of that circulation, is the subject of this talk. Where once the flow of knowledge moved overwhelmingly from metropolitan universities outward, today it increasingly moves in multiple directions – South to South, East to West, periphery to centre and back again. Scholars from Asia, Africa, and Latin America are not only generating new knowledge about their own regions; they are also reframing universal questions – about modernity, development, identity, and power – in ways that provincialise the assumptions of Western social science.

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