The Finnish institute in the Middle East (FIME) is organizing a Badaro Talk lecture online by dr. Samuli Lähteenaho.

The Beach multiple – coastal politics, environmentalism, and relational space in pre-collapse Lebanon

What can we learn of pre-collapse Lebanon through a focus on a single public beach? In this lecture, building on his doctoral dissertation, Samuli Lähteenaho examines politics of the Lebanese coastline in the years before Lebanon’s crisis, uprising and collapse. Through a focus on relationality of space, or ‘relative location’, the lecture discusses three threads: opposition to late neoliberal urbanism, the limits of political and nonpolitical, and grassroots environmentalist volunteerism.

The event will take place online on Thursday 28 November at 6 pm (UTC+2/EET).

Please sign up for the event at latest by 27.11. in here. You will receive the Zoom link after registration.

Biography

Samuli Lähteenaho is a postdoctoral researcher at the Finnish Institute in the Middle East (FIME). He recently defended his doctoral dissertation in social and cultural anthropology at the University of Helsinki. Samuli’s ethnographic research examines the coastline of Beirut and Lebanon from the perspective of environmental and urban politics. Samuli’s work is guided by interests in environmental politics and anthropology of space, as well as epistemological questions in the anthropology of politics. He is currently planning a new research project to explore how climate change as a material reality and technocratic discourse is encountered and related to in the fragile socio-political circumstances of Lebanon.