The 12th Archipelago Lecture - Is slowing down a trap?
We are pleased to welcome everyone to the next Stockholm Archipelago Lecture on the 7th of December 2023 at 4:30 pm (Stockholm time).
This year's guest is Michelle Bastian (University of Edinburgh & University of Oslo) who will give the 12th Archipelago lecture, titled "Recognising the trap of charismatic solutions to unsustainable times".
Thinking around sustainability has suggested at least five narratives of ‘sustaining time’ – that is stories about what kind of time will support more sustainable futures. These narratives often seek to counter a sped-up, over-worked, short-term, progress-oriented world. In contrast, a sustainable world is imagined as one imbued with long-term thinking, various versions of de-growth, a slower pace, more cyclical processes, and reduced working hours. In this year Archipelago Lecture, field philosopher Michelle Bastian suggests that the charisma of these sustaining times may actually reduce our ability to respond well to the current polycrisis, by pushing us to think of binary solutions to the problem of time. Far from providing solutions, she argues that these alternatives often perform a concern with time, while at best maintaining the status quo, or worse, covering over increasing destruction and inequality. She will instead suggest that in order to think about what is really crucial for re-storying time for more livable futures we need more detailed, concrete, and relational interventions that take context into account.
Michelle Bastian is a Senior Lecturer in Environmental Humanities at the Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh and an Associate Professor II at the University of Oslo in the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities. Her work crosses critical time studies and environmental humanities, with a focus on the role of time in human and more-than-human communities. She is Editor-in-Chief forTime & Society (SAGE) and a co-editor of a number of collections including; The Social Life of Time (Time & Society), Field Philosophy and Other Experiments(Parallax) and Participatory Research in More-than-Human Worlds (Routledge). Michelle has recent publications in Environment and Planning E, Environmental Humanities and GeoHumanities. From 2021-2022, Michelle was a Mid-Career Fellow supported by the Independent Social Research Fund, looking at the scientific study of seasonal lifecycle events (phenology) and how they could contribute to work in the environmental humanities.
Registration
Please register to secure your spot for this year's Archipelago Lecture by
registering here
Location and time
The lecture will be held in lecture hall E1 , on the 3rd floor, entrance at Lindstedtsvägen 3.
After Bastian's lecture, there will be time for questions and discussion, before we conclude the evening with a mingle from approx 18.30 to 19.30 in Ljusgård E
The Archipelago Lecture Series
The Archipelago Lecture Series has been a flagship event, inauguring every year the EHL’s public academic activities. 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. 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, just to mention a few.
