A Virtual Briefing & Film Screening Discussion with Columbia Anthropology Chair, Rosalind C. Morris

• Date: Thursday, November 5, 2026

• Time: 7:00 PM – 8:30 PM ET (Presentation begins promptly at 7:00 PM, followed by moderated Q&A)

• Platform: Virtual via Zoom

• Tickets: FREE for CUCFC Members | $5 for Non-Members

  
  

  Non-members, to register, input "1" in box on the right, then click PURCHASE TICKETS to pay the $5 token fee. You will receive Zoom participation details in an email.

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As corporate mining operations exhaust historic reserves and shutter deep shafts, informal and shadow economies emerge in their wake.  The Columbia University Club of Fairfield County invites you to an evening with Rosalind C. Morris, Moore Collegiate Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University.

Drawing from extensive field research and her book, Unstable Ground: The Lives, Deaths, and Afterlives of Gold in South Africa, Professor Morris will examine the convergence of global finance, environmental degradation, and labor precarity at the mineral frontier.

Special Advance Screening:

• The structural forces driving the rise of informal mining worldwide.

• The everyday lives, hazards, and legal precarity of migrant miners in abandoned South African gold fields.

• The social and economic trajectories of post-mining regions after corporate extraction ceases.

• Live Q&A moderated by a CUCFC panel.
  

Recommended Reading:

Attendees who wish to read the book in advance can purchase copies directly:

• Purchase the Book: Order Unstable Ground via Columbia University Press

Rosalind C. Morris is the Moore Collegiate Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. An internationally renowned sociocultural anthropologist and filmmaker, her scholarship investigates questions of value, labor, media technology, and the political economy of resource extraction, with an extensive ethnographic focus on Southern Africa and Southeast Asia. She is the author of numerous books, including Unstable Ground: The Lives, Deaths, and Afterlives of Gold in South Africa, which won the Lionel Trilling Book Prize, and For Lack of a Dictionary: poems (Fordham, 2025), longlisted for the PEN-Voelker Prize. Morris is also a documentarist (We Are Zama Zama and The Zama Zama Project). She has worked in South Africa for three decades, as an anthropologist and as a collaborator with South African artists. She holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago.