Inaugural Lecture Series: Professors Catherine Dolan and Michael Charney

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 'Re-Staking “Burma’s” History: the African and Black American "Burma” Experience in the First Half of the Twentieth Century'. 

Significant attention has been directed at Area Studies in recent years as a neo-colonial framework that locks in place a hegemonic Western knowledge regime inherited from the colonial period. More practically, the current configuration of Area Studies has made it difficult to measure development or to understand history in non-western societies in any way other than by comparison to the West. 

But nationalising our historical frameworks is no less blinding. Embracing rather than abandoning these loaded frameworks can help to reveal the very intimate relationship Africa, Africans, and African Americans had with Burma over the course of the 20th century, particularly from the 1940s and the impact Burma has had on shaping historical memory in Africa since. This presentation examines this history, why it is the most forgotten of 'forgotten histories' of Burma, and why remembering Burma's past should be important to a larger global audience. 

Understanding Burma through African (and African American) eyes rather than through those of the West, South Asia, or just the Burmese reveals a more diverse panoply of constructions of Burma on horizontal rather than vertical terms, exposing not only the fragility of Western framed Area Studies but also it’s advantages, helping to facilitate rather than to obfuscate the potential to decolonise knowledge about the country’s past.