Professor Benedict Kingsbury lecture - Sustaining Shared Futurities in a Planetary Era

How can we imagine and sustain shared futures in a time of profound planetary challenges?

This lecture explores how law and infrastructure shape our capacity to live together on a rapidly changing planet. From digital systems and global and space networks to legal and institutional arrangements, infrastructures do more than provide technical support — they organise relationships, distribute power, and structure responsibility and opportunity.

By understanding infrastructure as a set of social and legal relationships rather than merely technical objects, the lecture examines how new publics emerge, where law falls out of step, and how practices of care, repair, and collective action might help sustain shared futures across local and planetary scales.