Lecture by honorary doctor Achille Mbembe

The Universal Right to Breathe

In this lecture Achille Mbembe will revisit his 2020 essay ‘The Universal Right to Breathe’.

Foto/ill.:

University of Southern California/Duke University Press

Hovedinnhold

Since Achille Mbembe wrote the essay ‘The Universal Right to Breathe’ in 2020 world historical developments have gathered apace. The right to breathe and to the means of existence has only become an even more difficult and contested topic. Climate change has accelerated, and war is more than ever the sacrament of our time.

In his lecture, Mbembe will reflect on some of these newly changed conditions from the vantage point of Africa, a key laboratory of planetary transformations

Programme

Moderator: Pro dean for research at Faculty of Social Sciences, Prof. Siri Gloppen, University of Bergen.

10:00: Welcome

Dean of Faculty of Social Sciences, prof. Jan-Erik Askildsen, University of Bergen

10:05 - 10:10: Achille Mbembe: An introduction

Prof. Bjørn Enge Bertelsen, Dept. of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen

10:10 - 11:00: “The Universal Right to Breathe”

Prof. Achille Mbembe, Wits Institute for Social Science Research (WISER), University of the Witwatersrand

11:00 - 12:00: Commentaries, discussion and Q&A from the audience

Dr. Catalina Vallejo Pidrahíta, Facuilty of Law, University of Bergen (commentator) Dr. Carmeliza Rosário, Chr. Michelsen Institute and University of Bergen (commentator)

Foredrag

02.06.2022 - 10.00–12.00

Egget, Studentsenteret

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Professor Achille Mbembe, born in Cameroon, obtained his Ph.D in History at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1989 and a D.E.A. in Political Science at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques (Paris). Currently being affiliated with Wits Institute for Social Science Research (WISER), University of the Witwatersrand and being a co-founder of Les Ateliers de la pensee de Dakar, he is a major figure in the emergence of a new wave of French critical theory.

Mbembe has written extensively on contemporary politics and philosophy, including On the Postcolony (University of California Press, 2001), Critique of Black Reason (Duke University Press, 2016), Necropolitics (Duke University Press, 2019) and Out of the Dark Night. Essays on Decolonization (Columbia University Press, 2020). Originally written in French, his books and numerous articles are translated in fourteen languages (English, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Slovenian, Danish, Swedish, Romanian, Arabic, Chinese and Norwegian).

20.05.2022