Chaired by Dr Alessandra Mezzadri 

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.

Chaired by Prof Navtej Purewal

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. 

Chaired by Prof Christopher Cramer

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.

Re-reading the ‘right to development’: The imperative of sovereign national project and policy sovereignty

The ‘rights to development’ discourse has, in recent times, shifted its emphasis to individuals as right-bearers. The party with the primary responsibility for realising the rights is the state. This, we argue, was not always the case. In its earlier iteration, the concern of the ‘right to development’ discourse was on the inequities of the international political economy and the structural disadvantages that most countries of the Global South, emerging from colonialism, faced. The right to development was country-corporate, development understood at growth with structural transformation, and the bearers of the responsibility for redressing the global inequities being the developed countries.

In this address, we explore the changing meaning of the ‘right to development.’ We explore the interface between the state's rights and obligations in the context of the demand for a new international economic order and its anchor on global social justice. We further explore the paradox of a shift in the term's meaning to individual rights precisely with the dominance of neoliberalism. We conclude with an emphasis on the imperative of sovereign national projects and policy autonomy for realising the right to development at the corporate and individual levels.