The Stockholm Archipelago Lecture Series is the annual flagship event of the KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory. Inspired by the variety of the islands making up the Stockholm Archipelago, the KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory proposes a vision of the environmental humanities as an open, diverse but nonetheless connected archipelago of disciplines and approaches. David Lowenthal gave the inspiring inaugural lecture in 2012, and since they have hosted thirteen distinguished guests including Indian writer Amitav Ghosh, African philosopher Achille Mbembe and US political scientist Nancy Fraser.
Photo by Jamie Wang
The 15th Archipelago Lecture, December 9th, 2026
We are excited to announce that cultural & environmental anthropologist Sophie Chao will be coming to Stockholm in December to give this year’s Stockholm Archipelago Lecture
Multispecies Justice in Worlds Beyond Bios
Multispecies research asks how humans and other-than-human beings—such as plants, animals, landscapes, and ecosystems—shape worlds together. Increasingly, scholars are asking what justice might mean beyond the human and how we can build fairer relationships in shared worlds marked by inequality and environmental change. Drawing on two interdisciplinary collaborations across anthropology, geography, Indigenous studies, political theory, and feminist theory, this Archipelago lecture explores the possibilities and challenges of theorizing and enacting multispecies justice. It extends these questions beyond living beings to include forms of matter that are not always considered “alive,” including soils, waters, mountains, ancestors, spirits, and ghosts, to ask: What responsibilities do humans have toward worlds beyond bios? How can justice account for both more-than-human life and ongoing injustices faced by marginalised human communities? And how might thinking beyond secular scientific definitions of "life" open new ways of imagining justice in this age of planetary unraveling?
Sophie Chao is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sydney. Her research investigates ecology, capitalism, health, food, and justice in the Pacific. She is author of In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua (2022), Land of Famished Beings: West Papuan Theories of Hunger (2025), and Plantations: Extraction, Extinction, Emergence (2026), and co-editor of The Promise of Multispecies Justice (2022) and Worlds Beyond Bios: The Life of Matter and the Matter of Life (2026). Chao is of Sino-French heritage and lives on unceded Gadigal lands in Sydney, Australia. For more information, please visit
www.morethanhumanworlds.com.
