Shirin M. Rai is Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of Politics and International Studies SOAS, University of London.  She is a Fellow of the British Academy.

She is the Founding Director of Warwick Interdisciplinary Research Centre for International Development (WICID)at the University of Warwick. 

Shirin Rai is an interdisciplinary scholar and

Social Reproduction, Depletion and/in Crisis

Reproduction of life , which is theorized as social reproduction, doesn’t just happen—it is laboured over, in different contexts and with differential resources, unequally. The exploitation of this work of life-giving and maintenance depletes lives and generates crises of care that threatens not just livelihoods but lives. The denial of this work is institutionalized through our methodologies of accounting for work, through our ideological positioning of domestic work, through cultural and social gendered norms. In all countries, in all classes, races, religions, and cultures, women perform these labours more than men.  Building on her book, Depletion: the human costs of caring, Rai will argue that this labour can and does lead to depletion - of individuals, households and communities. But as classed, raced, and located in deeply unequal ways, this depletion is experienced differently and intersectionally. Rai will then address issues of how depletion can be reversed and how transformative politics requires the building of reflexive solidarities.

Professor Naomi Hossain

Naomi is a political sociologist with degrees in philosophy, politics, economics, social anthropology and development studies from the University of Oxford, London School of Economics and Political Science, and the University of Sussex. She is part-Bangladeshi and part-Irish, and has lived and worked in Bangladesh, at the world’s largest NGO, BRAC; in Indonesia and the UK, while at the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex University; and in the US, at the Accountability Research Center at American University in Washington DC.

Naomi is interested in the politics of development, particularly in how people living with poverty and precarity get the public services they need, and increasingly in the politics of crises and disasters. Her work enters two distinct but occasionally converging areas: the politics of Bangladesh’s development, and the contentious politics of public services. In both areas, she focuses on issues of state accountability and responsiveness, protest and civic agency, and the role of aid. To both she brings an interest in concepts and frameworks from social history, in particular the ‘moral economy’. Recent work has focused on the politics of complaint, food and fuel riots, and how changing civic space shapes development. Naomi aims to be collaborative, inter-disciplinary and visual in her research, and to make a difference that goes beyond the scholarly, working with researchers from around the world as well as with social movements, civic actors, artists, governments and aid agencies.

On not being poor: bare life and Bangla-futurism in the aid lab

Becoming not-poor is supposed to be the point of development, but as students of the development process, our interest often seems to wane at precisely the point people stop being poor. We rarely reflect on how moving out of poverty changes people and our place in the world, or on the problem (for that is what it is) of new wealth. Perhaps this is due to our disciplinary blinkers, and the enduring marginalization of the arts and humanities in the study of development. Yet these are issues we are grappling with in Bangladesh, former posterchild for Third World misery, site of a thousand development studies theses. This talk will examine the Bangladesh experience of leaving poverty behind. It will analyze some of the catastrophic moments in its history that memorably branded its poverty on the global imagination, mining them for their insights into the political philosophy of aid. Into the more affluent present, it will consider what imaginative new cultural productions and techno-utopian visions say about how Bangladeshis now view themselves and their place in the world. And it will reflect on how the political sovereignty that comes with no longer being poor – the power to do what needs to be done – is now being deployed to manage the effects of the climate crisis. 

Jimi Adeṣina is a Professor and the South African Research Chair in Social Policy at the College of Graduate Studies, University of South Africa in South Africa. He was educated at the University of Ibadan (Nigeria) and the University of Warwick (United Kingdom). He taught at the University of Ibadan (Nigeria), where he was Chair of the Department of Sociology. Subsequently, he was a Professor of Sociology at Rhodes University, and a Professor of Sociology and Head of Department at the University of the Western Cape. He has held visiting appointments at several institutions, including the Ulster University (Derry, Northern Ireland), the University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg), the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (Addis Ababa), the University of Oxford (UK), the Nordic African Institute (Sweden), and the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (Geneva, Switzerland). 

His areas of research interests include Sociology, Social Policy, and the Political Economy of Africa’s Development. He has published extensively in these areas.

On Redistribution, Restoration and Development: Reflections on some old ideas and their current relevance

This address is in two main parts. In the first part, we explore the themes of redistributive and restorative justice discourses and claims broadly but more specifically as they relate to development discourse. Further, we explore the campaign for reparation as the intersection of redistributive and restorative justice claims. This ranges from the debates around racial capitalism and decolonisation to climate-related financing. We offer a reflection on aid, within the framework of redistributive and restorative justice, as international solidarity or “helping ‘distant strangers.’” We use the case of the policy take of the ‘donor community’ on ‘poverty alleviation’ to offer a reflection on the competing claims of this policy diffusion.

The deliberate linking of reparation claims to the ‘right to development’—within a framing of redistribution and restoration—offers the connection to the second part of this address. While for some, the COVID-19 pandemic offers a solid rationale for the shift of the focus of Development Studies to Global Development, in the African context, the pandemic unmasked the continent’s development crisis in the classical sense of development as the process of the structural transformation of economy and society, mastery of technology, a robust and nimble manufacturing capacity, and the enhancement of human wellbeing. Ranging from utter dependence on imports for equipment to the absence of any vaccine candidate, the pandemic highlights the enduring relevance of the classical conception of development. Further, the pandemic offers insights into the limit of aid as ‘help to distant strangers’—with its version of distributive and restorative justice.