Keynote by Prof. Dr. Gisa Weszkalnys

“Affective Regulation and the Liabilities of Time”

Prof. Dr. Gisa Weszkalnys (LSE) offers a keynote speech of the second annual IMPRS Spring School titled: “Affective Regulation and the Liabilities of Time.” This event is open to the university.

Organized by the Research Centre Global Dynamics in connection with the MPI for Social Anthropology

This talk explores the affective and racialized dimensions of resource extraction, focusing on how emotions, expectations, and historical legacies shape an emergent oil economy. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in São Tomé and Príncipe, I show how corporations, government, and international organizations regulate not only material resources but also the temporal and emotional responses of those living in resource frontiers. Oil, perpetually promised but never realized, has produced a state of waiting, where hope and frustration are managed as liabilities. Yet alongside this effort at affective regulation, state technocrats and corporate actors position themselves as resource makers navigating a global industry, an emergent legal architecture, and institutional frameworks. Tracing the colonial legacies of plantation economies and racialized labour governance, I argue that rather than securing economic sovereignty, extractive capitalism echoes historical techniques of affective control while also generating new forms of expert action that can seem at once empowering and futile.

When: 1 April 2025, 16:00–18:00 hrs.
Where: Lecture Hall (Vortragsraum) at Bibltioteca Albertina, Beethovenstraße 6, 04107 Leipzig