Past Event

Department of Sociology & Anthropology Colloquium  co-sponsored with the Institute of African Studies

“Paradise without labour”: How oil missed its utopian moment

with
David M. Hughes, Rutgers University

Wednesday, November 16, 2011
3:00 – 4:30 pm
History Lounge (433 Paterson Hall)**

As an environmental anthropologist, David McDermott Hughes studies the co-production of landscapes and cultural formations.  His earliest work centered on colonial encounters. From Enslavement to Environmentalism: Politics on a Southern African Frontier (University of Washington Press, 2006) traces the continuities between past white settlement and current eco-tourism.  A second African book, Whiteness in Zimbabwe: Race, Landscape, and the Problem of Belonging (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), reassesses racism and conservation among the descendants of European settlers.  In 2009, Hughes shifted regions and topics.  He is now writing an ethnography of complicity with climate change, focusing on the petro-state of Trinidad and Tobago.  He is associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at Rutgers University, where he also directs the undergraduate program.

** A campus map can be found at http://carleton.ca/campus/ .