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Launch of 'Decolonising the Neo-liberal University: Law, Psychoanalysis and the Politics of Student Protest'

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Venue: Online

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We take pleasure in inviting you to the launch of 'Decolonising the Neo-liberal University: Law, Psychoanalysis and the Politics of Student Protest', a book that consists of Jacqueline Rose’s 2017 University of Cape Town Vice-Chancellor’s Open Lecture and a tightly arranged set of responses to the lecture by academics of international repute, including Judith Butler and Achille Mbembe.

The book takes the postcolonial or, more specifically, the post-apartheid – university as its focus, and considers the violence and the trauma of the global neoliberal hegemony as its central point of reference. Following a primarily psychoanalytic line of enquiry, it engages a range of disciplines – law, philosophy, literature, gender studies, cultural studies and political economy – in order better to understand the conditions of possibility of an emancipatory, or decolonised, higher education. And this in the context of both the inter-generational transmission of the trauma of colonialism, on the one hand, and, on the other, the trauma of neoliberal subjectivity in the postcolonial university. This truly interdisciplinary collection will appeal to a wide range of readers right across the humanities, but especially those with substantial interests in the contemporary state of the university, as well as those with theoretical interests in postcolonialism, psychoanalysis, gender studies, cultural studies, jurisprudence and law. Decolonising the Neo-liberal University is published by Birkbeck Law Press, an imprint of Routledge.

Jacqueline Rose will be in conversation with the editor of the collection, Jaco Barnard-Naudé, and with contributors, Victoria Collis-Buthelezi and Joel M Modiri.

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Speakers
  • Jaco Barnard-Naudé -

    Jaco Barnard-Naudé is Professor of Jurisprudence and Co-Director of the Centre for Rhetoric Studies (CRhS) at the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) Law Faculty, South Africa. From 2020 to 2021, he was a Research Professor in the Free State Centre for Human Rights at the University of the Free State, South Africa. He is a past recipient of the UCT Fellows’ Award and was the British Academy’s Newton Advanced Fellow in the Westminster Law and Theory Lab at the University of Westminster Law School, UK, from 2017 to 2020. Jaco holds a B2-rating from the South African National Research Foundation (NRF) and is also a past Honorary Research Fellow of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London, UK. He publishes widely in the fields of Jurisprudence, Law and Literature, Spatial Justice, Queer Legal Theory, Contractual Justice after Apartheid and Transitional Post-Apartheid Justice.

  • Joel M. Modiri -

    Joel M. Modiri is Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Jurisprudence, University of Pretoria, South Africa. His research and teaching interests lie broadly in the area of legal and political philosophy, critical race theory, Black political thought and African jurisprudence. He is currently working on a number of projects elaborating on Black Consciousness and Pan-Africanism as a critique of post-apartheid political rationality/ies.

  • Prof Jacqueline Rose
  • Victoria J. Collis-Buthelezi -

    Victoria J. Collis-Buthelezi is Associate Professor in English at the University of Johannesburg (UJ) and Director of UJ’s Centre for the Study of Race, Gender and Class. She is a senior research fellow at the Johannesburg Institute of Advanced Studies (JIAS) and a research associate at the Institute for Research in African American Studies (IRAAS) at Columbia University, USA. Her research is on Black intellectual and literary histories and has appeared in Small Axe, Callaloo, boundary2 and the UK Journal of Arts
    and the Humanities. Her current book project explores global frames for understanding Blackness in early twentieth-century Cape Town. Collis-Buthelezi is on the editorial committee for Small Axe and an editor of the Polity Critical South book series as well as Peter Lang’s Race and Resistance in the Long Twentieth Century.