Lecture: Leah Cowan

Curators

School SOS

School SOS invites Leah Cowan to discuss archival material from her family history, forming a creative and expansive inquiry into the hostile environment and its origins.

This is the second of the SOS-25 Public Lecture Series hosted by The Koppel Project.

The emergence of everyday borders, including the 'No Recourse to Public Funds' condition are a necropolitical project: they are part of the way in which, as the historian Achille Mbembe writes, governments get to decide who will live and who will die. In this talk, Leah Cowan plots her family’s roots in this history, which brought her grandparents from Jamaica to England in the 1950s. Using archival sources and an creative, expansive, storytelling lens that places the past in conversation with the present, she joins the dots between the origins of racial capitalism, and the hostile environment. Crucial along this pathway are tools for our survival: sabotage, resistance, non-compliance and struggles for worker’s rights, which multi-national corporations and states adhering to the neoliberal world order seek to crush.

School SOS is a nomadic not-for-profit school of Critical Spatial Practices, providing space for Higher Education after-care. SOS-25 is a free 6 week critical spatial designer development programme based in London, UK for 12 participants, starting from the 22nd of July 2025, supported using public funding by Arts Council England.