The CRESC Conference ‘In/vulnerabilities and Social Change: Precarious Lives and Experimental Knowledge’ took place at SOAS, London 4-6 September 2013.

CTD researcher Inge Butter presented a paper within the panel entitled ‘Managing in/vulnerabilities in postcolonial Africa – anticipatory and experimental approaches to uncertain futures’ and spoke about the vulnerabilities of formalizing financial transactions from a Chadian perspective.  The panel has been organized by Sandra Calkins, Uli Beisel and Andrea Behrends.

Conference prospectus

In a context of radical uncertainty about political, economic and ecological futures, the 2013 CRESC annual conference will explore the relationship between vulnerability and invulnerability. Lives and life chances are precarious for many. We may be entering a period of greater insecurity as people, jobs, money, commerce, markets, knowledge and ideas, institutions, networks and systems all come under strain as a result of financial turmoil and widening inequalities.

The conference will explore the vulnerabilities of the majority and ask:

• Where are those vulnerabilities, new and old?
• Is vulnerability a newly defining feature of certain categories of people?
• What are the consequences of vulnerability-led policy in finance, industry, environment, health, security, technological and communications systems?
• How has vulnerability been (re)politicised through social movements and direct action?

At the same time, the conference will explore the in/vulnerabilities of elites and their ways of knowing. Professional and elite knowledges sensitise themselves to specific phenomena by discounting other kinds of experience. Claiming competence in key areas, expert knowledge becomes invulnerable by ignoring dissident and dissonant forms of understanding. But, as the recent financial crisis has shown, elite expertise also becomes dangerously vulnerable when confronted by the unexpected. The conference will explore the power and the frailties of high-status and armour-plated intellectual and social knowledge systems. It will also consider how they efface, devalue or misrecognise many forms of lived experience. It will ask:

• How are elite professional invulnerabilities secured in an uncertain age?
• How do different kinds of in/vulnerabilities relate to forms of strength or power?
• In times of crisis, which orthodoxies – or forms of knowledge – are overturned, and which become entrenched? And why?
• What other ways of knowing might be imagined for recognising in/vulnerabilities and enacting social change?

Panel abstract

Managing in/vulnerabilities in postcolonial Africa – anticipatory and experimental approaches to uncertain futures

Postcolonial Africa is ridden with in/vulnerabilities, which make the continent prone to breakdowns and crises. “Safety first” has become a main legitimation of developmental, emergency and state interventions, generating new experimental modes of knowing and altering practices and the ways in which affected people conceive of themselves, their situation, their environment, and health. The focus in this panel is on how conceptions of in/vulnerability affect practices and meanings in contemporary African settings. It investigates in/vulnerability as a technique used by certain powerful actors to constitute populations as “vulnerable people” in relation to anticipated damages and dangers, and to manage them in line with various political objectives. The different papers explore how vulnerability is put to work to assemble disparate elements around an assumption: vulnerable things and people need to be rendered “safe”, they call for planned strategic action and the deployment of various methods to anticipate and control harms. These experimental practices and interventions are often implemented in form of projects: time- and place-bound experiments that have to be feasible, effective and rendered accountable to their funders. This panel focuses on various experimental ways of reducing vulnerabilities and rendering a precarious future more secure, it interrogates conceptions of vulnerability, analyses their temporalities, logics and effects –desired and unintended.