Dear all, We're pleased to invite you to a BBL by Professor Henrik Ernstson, Environmental Science Department at KTH (aka SEED) who will present their latest manuscript 'Dredge Captial' (see below). It will be held in Holling. You're welcome to join online too. Zoom: https://stockholmuniversity.zoom.us/j/67104331692 Hope to see many of you there. The sand team ----- Dredge Capital: Political Geomorphology and the Contradictions of Sediment Accumulation Joshua A. Lewis, Henrik Ernstson, Ashley Carse, and Jonas Hein Presented by Professor Henrik Ernstson, Environmental Science Department at KTH (aka SEED) Abstract: The paper intervenes in geographic debates across political ecology, critical infrastructure studies, and critical physical geography by foregrounding the geomorphological dimensions of capitalist expansion—how capital not only flows through but also physically reshapes the land and waterscapes upon which it depends. The conjuncture of the climate crisis, planetary urbanization and ecological disruption has sharpened scholarly and political attention to the material dimensions of capitalist development. In geography and cognate fields, infrastructure has emerged as an analytical concept and set of material phenomena for understanding how capital reshapes the built environment and natural world. And yet, the large-scale earth moving work that underpins many infrastructures—literally or operationally—has received limited attention in these conversations. We approach dredging as a central but underexamined practice through which global capitalism shapes and is, in turn, shaped by earth systems. By tracing the historical emergence, global expansion, and dominant position of the Dutch-Belgian dredging industry cluster, we theorize and historicize dredge capital as a material and institutional formation that reorganizes geohydrological systems to sustain accumulation, even as it generates ecological contradictions. Our analysis demonstrates that, in the age of logistics-led development and climate anxiety, contemporary capitalism’s capacity to endure environmental disruption depends increasingly on its ability to mobilize dredging as a spatial and geomorphological fix to its own crises of accumulation and ecological instability. Key words: dredge capital, political geomorphology, spatial fix, Netherlands, Belgium, geosocialities Bio: Henrik Ernstson is a human geographer and political ecologist and Professor in Sustainable Urban Development and Docent in Political Ecology at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. He is Honorary Senior Research Scholar in Human Geography at The University of Manchester, UK, where he previously worked as Lecturer. He has been Honorary Associate Professor in Urban Studies at the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town, where he lived and worked for almost a decade. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University in California and has worked as a researcher at KTH's Environmental Humanities Lab and the Department of Environmental History. He received his PhD in Natural Resource Management and Systems Ecology from Stockholm University and holds a Master of Science in Applied Physics from Linköping University.

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Kiran Pereira

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