Program on Science, Technology and Society at Harvard

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Energy Politics: After Carbon Democracy

Timothy Mitchell

Columbia University

March 5, 2013, 4:00pm-6:00pm
Hauser 102, Harvard Law School

Abstract

Professor Mitchell will lead a discussion on the themes raised in his recent book Carbon Democracy. He will share his thoughts as they have developed after completing that book and will reflect on the forms of politics that may arise in tandem with future energy transitions.

About the speaker

Timothy Mitchell is Professor and Chair of the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. His books include Colonising Egypt (1991), exploring the emergence of the modern state in the colonial period and  the forms of reason, power and knowledge that define the experience of modernity; Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (2002), drawing on his work in Egypt to examine the making of “the economy” and “the market” as objects of twentieth-century politics and the wider role of expert knowledge in the formation of the contemporary state; and Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (2011), arguing that no nation escapes the political consequences of our collective dependence on oil and that the politics of the West have become dependent on an undemocratic Middle East.

Co-sponsored by the Institute for Global Law and Policy