Global social theory: building resources

There has been an intensification of student protests around the world addressing issues of racial exclusion and racialised hierarchy within the university, including its teaching and research practices. These movements point to urgent concerns about what and how we teach and research, and how the resources of universities might be used to support the amelioration of injustice rather than its reproduction. This short piece focuses on the curriculum and points to actions that we can take to build resources for a more dynamic and adequate curriculum within our universities. In particular, it discusses one collaborative initiative that all the authors have been involved in, the website Global Social Theory. This site provides resources for the diversification and expansion of the curriculum for those teaching and studying social theory

On the coloniality of “new” mega‐infrastructure projects in east Africa

This article responds to a preference for short‐term history in research on the infrastructure turn by engaging with the longue durée of East Africa’s latest infrastructure scramble. It traces the history of LAPSSET in Kenya and the Central Corridor in Tanzania, revealing the coloniality of new and improved transport infrastructure along both corridors. This exercise demonstrates how the spatial visions and territorial plans of colonial administrators get built in to new infrastructure and materialise in ways that serve the interests of global capital rather than peasant and indigenous peoples being promised more modern, prosperous futures. The article concludes by suggesting that a focus on the longue durée also reveals uneven patterns of mobility and immobility set in motion during the colonial scramble for Africa and reinforced after independence. These “colonial moorings” are significant as they shape political reactions to new mega‐infrastructure projects today and constrain the emancipatory potential of infrastructure‐led development

Understanding Global Change: From Documentation and Collaboration to Social Transformation

The conclusion to the book situates the chapters within four programs of anthropological research on climate change: (1) documentation of local impacts of and adaptations to climate change, (2) connections to socioeconomic and political contexts, (3) collaborations with nonanthropologists, and (4) activism and social transformation. The final section notes the persistent challenges to creating positive change and meaningful research outcomes. It highlights some examples of success and outlines future directions for politically engaged anthropological work around climate change

A critical psychology of the postcolonial

Of the theoretical resources typically taken as the underlying foundations of critical social psychology, elements, typically, each of Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis, and Post-Structuralism, one particular mode of critique remains notably absent: postcolonial theory. What might be the most crucial contributions that postcolonial critique can make to the project of critical psychology? One answer is that of a reciprocal forms of critique, the retrieval of a ‘psychopolitics’ in which we not only place the psychological within the register of the political, but - perhaps more challengingly - in which the political is also, strategically, approached through the register of the psychological. What the writings of Fanon and Biko make plain in this connection is the degree to which the narratives and concepts of the social psychological may be reformulated so as to fashion a novel discourse of resistance, one that opens up new avenues for critique for critical psychology, on one hand, and that affords an innovative set of opportunities for the psychological investigation of the vicissitudes of the postcolonial, on the othe