Novara Media

Novara FM: Infrastructure for the End of the World w/ Laleh Khalili

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Episode notes

A train derails, spilling its toxic cargo over a rust belt town. Unknown saboteurs blow up a critical undersea pipeline. A hydroelectric dam raises the risk of nuclear war. In short, infrastructure is always political, as the academic Laleh Khalili urgently reminds us in her writing.

If the world works like it does because of the infrastructure we already have, how do we struggle for the infrastructure of a better planet to come? The author of Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula tells Eleanor Penny about the long history and the future of fights over the systems that make our world what it is.

You can read her article ‘Apocalyptic Infrastructure’ online in NOEMA magazine.