Residual Governance: How South Africa Foretells Planetary Futures

with Gabrielle Hecht

Tuesday – 12 November 2024 – 2:00 pm to 3:30 pm EST

Seely Hall, Trinity College, 6 Hoskin Avenue, Toronto, ON M5S 1H8 – Institute for the History & Philosophy of Science & Technology

This talk dives into the wastes of gold and uranium mining in South Africa to explore how communities, experts, and artists fight for infrastructural and environmental justice. Mining in South Africa is a prime example of what Hecht theorizes as residual governance—the governance of waste and discard, governance that is purposefully inefficient, and governance that treats people and places as waste and wastelands. Centering the voices of people who resist the harms of toxic mining waste shows how the logic of residual governance lies at the heart of contemporary global racial capitalism and is a major accelerant of the Anthropocene. 

Gabrielle Hecht is Professor of History at Stanford University. She is the author of Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade, which received the Martin Klein Prize in African history and was shortlisted for the African Studies Association’s Herskovits Prize, and The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity after World War II. She is also editor of Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War. 

Nov.12, 2024 from 2:00 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. *Reception to follow*

This event is part of “Surviving the Anthropocene” with an additional talk taking place as part of this program: