Jewellord Nem Singh: State Owned in Latin America

State ownership is argued and reshaped not only through state-market relations but also in the ways the state defines its relationship to its citizens. The recent commodity price boom has led to the return of resource nationalism in South America, with significant institutional changes taking place in mine ownership and subsoil rights from private to public hands.

Jewellord (JoJo) Nem Singh presents state ownership in longue durée, examining the place of resource sovereignty in developmental projects in Latin America since the post-war years alongside examples from film and video documentaries. He also questions the role and prospects of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in resource-intensive economies as the commodity boom draws to a close and right-wing governments take power across the region, changing the future face of arts and the humanities.

Nem Singh’s presentation is followed by a panel discussion with anthropologist Rune Steenberg Reyhé.  

Jojo Nem Singh is Assistant Professor of International Relations at Leiden University, Netherlands and an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. He is the author of a forthcoming manuscript titled Building Developmental Capacity: State-owned Enterprises and Natural Resources in Latin America. He is an International Co-Investigator of the research grant funded by the Fondecyt Regular 2016, Comisión Nacional de Investigación Científica y Tecnológica in Chile titled Who is Responsible for Local Development? A Political Geography of New Structuralism in Export Communities with Jonathan Barton (PUC-Chile).

His current research, State Capacity for Poverty Reduction: The Politics of Pro-poor Growth in Resource-rich Countries, examines the central role of political coalitions and institution-building in promoting poverty reduction in Latin America and Southern Africa. He is editor of a special issue, Developmental States beyond East Asia, to be published in Third World Quarterly, and co-editor of two edited volumes, Demanding Justice in the Global South: Claiming Rights (Palgrave, 2017) and Resource Governance and Developmental States in the Global South: Critical International Political Economy Perspectives (Palgrave, 2013).  

Rune Steenberg Reyhé is an anthropologist working on Central Asia and North-West China. He specialises in kinship studies and economic anthropology with a particular focus on social networks, community, state and market expansion and Islamic revival. After receiving his PhD from Freie Universität Berlin he has held research and professorship positions at Dahlem Research School, Universität Bonn, Columbia University, Aga Khan University London and Copenhagen University. His current work concerns the concept of informality and local ethnographic writing.

This event is part of a series titled We Want Everything, programmed by Dr Stephen Wilson in collaboration with the ICA. The series is staged in collaboration with the ICA and the Chelsea, Camberwell and Wimbledon College of Arts postgraduate community. We Want Everything asks us to recognize the meaning of art and human life regardless of economic flows.

Given the neoliberal conditions we find our future-selves contending with, this public series of events explores human prerequisites such as citizenship, agency and the permission to experience any emotions. In an unstable field of bio-political inequalities, unconscious bias, data technologies, happiness industries and isolation, how do art and design practices maintain their love of complexity and deviation under the auspices of increased atomization?  

In collaboration with UAL, Camberwell, Chelsea and Wimbledon