John Comaroff

Category: Justice

  • Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff

    Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff

    Between 1976 and 2010,  Alan Macfarlane, a professor in the Department of Sociology at Cambridge University,  conducted a series of interviews with anthropologists from around the world. Two of those anthropologists included John and Jean Comaroff. They discussed their early lives, their work in the field, life under the Apartheid regime and anthropology, among other things.

  • Lawyers respond to civil suit

    Lawyers respond to civil suit

    Norman Zalkind, Janet Halley, and Ruth O’Meara-Costello issue the following statement, on behalf of
    their client, Professor John Comaroff, in response to the lawsuit filed today by plaintiffs Margaret
    Czerwienski, Amulya Mandava, and Lilia Kilburn. Professor Comaroff categorically denies ever harassing or retaliating against any student.

    To address the lawsuit’s specific allegations, Professor Comaroff was never the subject of any Title IX or other complaint at the University of Chicago. There, as at Harvard, he was a sincerely devoted mentor to countless students.

    Professor Comaroff denies the claim that he made advances on an unnamed second-year graduate
    student. No such student has ever sought an investigation of claims against him. The only students
    whose complaints Harvard has notified him of are the plaintiffs.

    Regarding the 2017 meeting between Ms. Mandava and Professor Comaroff, Ms. Mandava and
    Professor Comaroff met at her request in order to speak about a grant proposal she was considering
    submitting. The conversation turned to the topic of gossip, which was relevant to Ms. Mandava’s
    academic topic, and Professor Comaroff spoke generally about its dangers in professional academic
    settings. In doing so, he was repeating advice that he had given to countless students over the years, including while teaching a seminar on professionalization at the University of Chicago. He absolutely denies threatening Ms. Mandava or Ms. Czerwienski, during that meeting or at any other time. Harvard’s thorough Title IX investigation found that not only had he not retaliated against either
    student—he was not even aware, during that meeting, of the rumors that the two were spreading about him. The truth is that Professor Comaroff consistently made every effort to assist these students and to advance their careers, both before and after the 2017 meeting.

    Regarding Ms. Kilburn, Professor Comaroff did not kiss her or touch her inappropriately at any time.
    Harvard’s Title IX investigation, which lasted over a year and was extraordinarily thorough, concluded
    that the evidence simply did not support claims that he had kissed or touched Ms. Kilburn. Allegations that he forbade her from working with her other advisor are simply false.

    Professor Comaroff did speak with Ms. Kilburn, who proposed to conduct fieldwork in Cameroon while traveling openly with her same-sex partner, about the risks that could attend that plan, including the risk of sexual violence. This was a necessary conversation for her safety and numerous faculty witnesses in the Title IX process attested that his advice was appropriate. The Title IX investigation found that he was motivated only by concern for Ms. Kilburn’s well-being and had no romantic or sexual intention, but that the advice nonetheless constituted sexual harassment. Professor Comaroff vehemently disputes this conclusion, which would cripple faculty members’ ability to use their best academic judgment in advising students about essential safety issues.

    Professor Comaroff is not only a leading scholar in his field—he is a deeply caring person who has
    devoted his energy for decades to mentoring and advancing generations of students. Attacks on his
    career based on gossip and rumor rather than actual evidence are shameful.

  • Interrogating the Global Dis/Order

    New York – In 2018, John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff spoke at The New School for Social Research about “Crime, Sovereignty, and the State: the Metaphysics of Global Disorder.” “The Global South” has become a shorthand for the universe of non-European, postcolonial peoples; it is that half of the planet about which, conventionally, the “Global North” spins theories. Rarely is it seen as a source of explanations for world historical processes, past or present, let alone as the source of those processes. Yet, as much of the northern hemisphere experiences increasing fiscal inscrutability and rising inequality, state privatization, crime and corruption, ethnic conflict, authoritarian populism, and other “crises,” it looks as though it is evolving southward, so to speak. Is this so? Might the relation of “north” and “south” be more a matter of complementary inequity, more a construct of the dialectical imagination, than a hard-and-fast empirical reality? In this seminar, we shall reverse the usual order of things, addressing a range of familiar themes in order to theorize them anew from the “eccentric location” of the “south,” broadly conceived: among those themes, neoliberalism and its futures; the changing relations among capital, the state and governance; democracy, authoritarian populism, and new forms of political life; the fetishism of the law and the judicialization of the public sphere; the paradoxes of twenty-first century nationhood and its jurisdictions; new magical economies; the crisis of liberalism; the meaning of crime and the metaphysics of disorder; and the present and future political economy of identity. This re-imagining of the contemporary global dis/order renders key problems of our time at once strange and familiar, giving an ironic twist to the evolutionary pathways long assumed by social scientists.

  • Weaponizing the legal system

    Weaponizing the legal system

    Cambridge – John Comaroff explains lawfare or how authoritarian regimes around the world weaponize the legal system to de-legitimize their opponents. The term lawfare was used in Brazil by the defense of former President Lula to describe the violations of legal procedures by the Brazilian courts, as he was a victim of a collective act to discredit him and remove him from public life. Preventing Lula’s election is the struggle of some judges, public prosecutors and most part of the press in Brazil.

  • Interview with John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff

    Interview with John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff

    Between 1976 and 2010,  Alan Macfarlane, a professor in the Department of Sociology at Cambridge University,  conducted a series of interviews with anthropologists from around the world. Two of those anthropologists included John and Jean Comaroff. They discussed their early lives, their work in the field, life under the Apartheid regime and anthropology, among other things.