TRANSTITUTIONAL: HEALTH, LAW AND THE POST-APARTHEID CONJUNCTURE
Kaushik Sunder Rajan, University of Chicago
Abstract
In this talk, Kaushik Sunder Rajan provides an overview on an ongoing research project, Transtitutional, which ethnographically attends to the ways in which a politics of health in South Africa has played out through the law consequent to the guarantee of a fundamental right to health in the post-apartheid South African Constitution.
The talk unpacks the meaning of the term “transtitutional”, and the various aspirations to emancipation and concepts regarding political community that it contains. Alongside, Kaushik Sunder Rajan will elaborate the three-fold research methodology he has employed:
- a critical, ethnographically situated reading of postapartheid case law around health in South Africa;
- a series of life-history interviews with key South African constitutionalists in order to elucidate a generational epistemic milieu that placed faith in a project of socioeconomic transformation via constitutional decolonization;
- and a philosophical theorization of constitutionalism as a political modality, especially as considered out of the Global South.
The work situates the contemporary politics of health in South Africa out of histories of imperialism and racialized extractive capitalism and a more recent post-apartheid history that is grounded in a commitment to, and contestations around, constitutionally normed transformation. In the process, Kaushik Sunder Rajan hopes to raise certain critical questions around the relationships between health, law, capital and democracy.
Location
STS Seminar Room & online via Zoom (https://univienna.zoom.us/j/64192719706?pwd=FS44WTvibHrNstmqw0xddH6thuRSGo.1)