Spring School 2025
Where: Leipzig University/ReCentGlobe at Strohsackpassage, Nikolaistraße 6–10, Leipzig
When: Monday, 31 Mar 2025, 9:45 hrs to Saturday, 5 Apr 2025, ~14:00 hrs.
Register by 15 Feb 2025 on Moodle
The annual Spring School, held at Leipzig University, is a key event of the IMPRS and offers doctoral researchers significant opportunities for both academic and social engagement. This academic highlight allows participants to work intensively on their thesis through training and feedback sessions. Key components of the program include writing workshops and presentation sessions designed to help participants refine and submit their chapters collaboratively. The Spring School also provides valuable interdisciplinary insights and networking opportunities through its various offerings. The event features close academic exchange with members of the IMPRS teaching faculty and other academics, as well as a keynote lecture by the renowned anthropologist Prof. Dr. Gisa Weszkalnys from the London School of Economics and Political Sciences.
Keynote by Prof. Dr. Gisa Weszkalnys (LSE)
Where: Bibliotheca Albertina (Vortragssaal), Beethovenstraße 6, Leipzig
When: Tuesday, 1 Apr 2025, 16:00–17:30 hrs
Organized by the Research Centre Global Dynamics and the MPI for Social Anthropology
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.
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.