Join this year’s Archipelago Lecture with Timothy Mitchell

Published Nov 25, 2024

On the 11th of December, we gather in the F building at KTH Campus for a lecture by Timothy Mitchell, Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Columbia University and author of "Carbon Democracy". Mitchell’s lecture, titled "On Rivercide: The Colonial Origins of Creative Destruction”, will be addressing the colonial destruction of the River Nile, resulting in a “rivercide”. Mitchell argues this ecocide helped shape the idea of capitalism as creative destruction, an idea that he thinks keeps misinforming our world.

“We are really pleased to have Timothy Mitchell for this year’s Archipelago Lecture. It’s hard to overestimate how important the breadth of his work, and the impact it has had on a wide variety of scholarly fields. Built upon his deep and critical knowledge of the modern Middle East, for more than two decades his scholarship has continually made us rethink the relationship between politics, the human and nonhuman worlds, and complex technical systems,” says Rob Gioielli, Director of KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory.

Timothy Mitchell writes about colonialism, political economy, the politics of energy, and the making of expert knowledge. He works across the disciplinary boundaries of history and the social sciences. Many of his writings explore materials from the history and contemporary politics of Egypt. He is the author of multiple books, including Colonizing Egypt, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity and Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil, all of which have had a profound impact on the fields of energy and environmental history and science and technology studies.

The Archipelago lecture and Q&A is between 17:00-19:00, followed by a mingle. Register here to secure your spot! For more information, see the event info here.

The Stockholm Archipelago Lectures is a series of lectures where the KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory (EHL) invites speakers who have contributed greatly to the field of environmental humanities. Inspired by the variety of the islands making up the Stockholm Archipelago, the EHL has proposed a vision of the environmental humanities as an open, diverse nonetheless connected archipelago of disciplines and approaches, which is reflected in our Archipelago Lecture series. David Lowenthal gave the inspiring inaugural lecture in 2012, and since we have hosted eleven distinguished guests including Indian writer Amitav Ghosh, African philosopher Achille Mbembe and US political scientist Nancy Fraser. Read more about past lectures here

EHL News