ASCL Seminar Series: Presence and social obligation: An essay on the share

In a 2015 book, James Ferguson analysed the notion of sharing as a principle of distribution of social protection payments or “cash transfers” in the Global South in general, and in southern Africa in particular. Noting that current schemes of distribution are (like all “social” schemes before them) limited by principles of nation-state membership, he concluded that it may be possible to detect new logics of social obligation emerging that work not according to a logic of citizenship and national membership, but according to a principle of “presence”. This seminar will elaborate this conception and develop a more complete account of how such an understanding of presence might provide a basis both for an expanded sense of social obligation and for more inclusionary forms of politics. Chair: Prof. Rijk van Dijk, ASCL. Speaker: James Ferguson, Stanford University

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