How Colonial History Continues, with Professor Chandana Alawattage

For the third seminar of the Business History through the looking glass of [De]colonisation: A BBS seminar mini-series, we will be joined by Chandana Alawattage, Professor in Accounting, Tax and Audit from the Adam Smith Business School, University of Glasgow.

This presentation concentrates on how the intricate historic-political connections between key elements of decolonising business and accounting history (colonisation, post-colonisation, decolonisation, and recolonisation) manifest in contemporary neoliberal accountabilities, reproducing paradoxical conditionalities of colonial despotism without colonialism. This is done by exploring two case studies in the peripheral South: the garment industry in Bangladesh and tea plantations in Sri Lanka. These case studies illuminate two different modes of reproducing colonial despotism in the contemporary neoliberal South.  

Professor Chandana Alawattage has experience of teaching and research in accounting and related subjects for more than 20 years now. Chandana is internationally known as a critical accounting scholar through his publications in leading accounting journals, such as: Accounting, Organisations, and Society (AOS), Critical perspectives on Accounting (CPA) and Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal (AAAJ). Among many other themes, he has published extensively on the issues pertaining to how western managerial and development discourses implicate on the polities, societies and the economies of the peripheral nations, and how people in peripheral nations accommodate and resist such discourses. 
His research has interesting ethnographic insights into the ways in which the dialectic between the global discourses and local practices takes place. He has extensively drawn on Marxist and post-Marxist social theories to theorise the connections between the global and the local.

If you would like to attend, please email Anita Lateano for details, at a.lateano@bham.ac.uk.

We hope to see you there!