Padkos and the Paulo Freire Institute, are very pleased to welcome Anna Selmeczi back to Maritzburg. Join us at 4:30 to hear the talk and share some drinks and snacks together.

We last met Anna when she did such a great job as our guest speaker at the launch of our second “Padkos Digest” volume in 2014. Anna currently holds the South African Research Chair Initiative (SARChI): Social Change, at the University of Fort Hare and has been a consistent partner in our journey to uncover paths towards emancipatory praxis in our South African context.

This time around Anna has some really important ideas to share, thinking carefully about South Africa’s ‘rebellion of the poor’. Key themes she’ll address are explored in the attached academic paper that she had published at the end of 2015: “Haunted by the Rebellion of the Poor: Civil Society and the Racialized Problem of the (Non-)economic Subject”.In that paper Selmeczi explores how the once-lauded modes of popular politics that characterised the struggle of the South African people in the 1980s are now thoroughly demobilised and delegitimised by the post-apartheid state and civil society.

While ‘the people’ were previously recognised as the subjects of emancipatory politics, now popular mobilisation and the ‘ungovernable poor’ are rendered as a rebellious threat. Her account of this process in the context of the South African struggle is illuminating and important as she traces for example, how the language of development was deployed in 1990s to radically separate off popular liberatory praxis from the newly-‘legitimate’ tasks at hand of reconstruction and state-building. Selmeczi brings us to the present too and helps explain how civil society under neo-liberalism is part of the machinery of governability that sees the organised and militant people as a threatening and racialised ‘other’.

The value of the paper lies in these important and critical themes that help us think more carefully and accurately about our praxis in South Africa at the moment. We look forward to engaging with Anna and you around these significant themes.

Co-hosted by Padkos at the Church Land Programme, and the Paulo Freire Institute, at the Centre for Adult Education, School of Education, on the Pietermaritzburg campus of the University of kwaZulu-Natal.