This year's Eilert Sundt Lecturer was Andrés Rodríguez-Pose, Professor of Economic Geography at the London School of Economics.
Andrés Rodríguez-Pose concentrated his lecture around the phenomena "The revenge of the places that don't matter".
It has long been argued that successful agglomeration economies drive economic dynamism.
Yet they also breed greater territorial inequality, which is at the root of a deep-seated and rising economic and social discontent in the European Union (EU).
In his lecture Rodríguez-Pose looked at how this rising discontent is increasingly affecting political behaviour in the EU, with long-term economic stagnating and/or declining regions - the so-called "places that don't matter" - increasingly venting their anger against the system at the ballot box.
- Nils Henrik M. von der Fehr, Dean at the Faculty of Social Sciences introduced Andrés Rodríguez-Pose.
- Kristian Stokke, Professor at the Department of Sociology and Human Geography was responsible for this year's Eilert Sundt Lecture.