Breaking Ground in Political Geology: Materials and Economies of Extraction, Energy and Earth
Dimensions of Political Ecology Conference on Nature and Society (DOPE)
Lexington, KY
February 26-March 1, 2014
www.politicalecology.org
Organizer:
Kai Bosworth, University of Minnesota
With the announcement of the Anthropocene, stratigraphers and geologists proposed that humanity has for the first time begun to leave its mark in the geologic record of the planet. While political ecologists and other critical scholars have been skeptical of such wide generalizations (especially within the context of global capitalism), our collective entrance into the Anthropocene nonetheless compels us to rethink the massive scale of geologic processes and materials and their impact on and augmentation by contemporary and future planetary sociopolitical formations (Zalasiewicz 2008). If forms of life, art and politics are constructed through relations with earth forces and materials, we must begin to rethink social relations, geopolitics, and even the history and future of capitalism. For political ecologists and others, this has prompted investigations into a wide range of geologic topics, including earthquakes and other vibratory earth forces (Clark 2011), political economies of energy, extraction and clandestine activist networks (Bebbington 2012, Bridge 2011, Mitchell 2013), the construction of subterranean spaces, holes, and territories (Braun 2000, Elden 2013, Scott 2008), and possible political responses that attend to the gravity and scope of a dynamic planet. These situations impel us to take the forces and materials of the Earth seriously.
This session invites critical empirical, theoretical or artistic inquiries that explore the geologic and political nature of energy, extraction, and earth forces or materials. Building off recent works straddling the humanities, social sciences and sciences and take up the challenge of thinking the forces, materials, and economies of the geologic (e.g., Ellsworth and Kruse 2013, Yusoff et al 2012, Yusoff 2013), here we seek to implicate and complicate the conceptual foundations and methods of political ecology. What different relations must be attended when the systems we attend to are nonliving, inorganic, or geologic rather than ecologic or ecosystemic? What specific engagements with institutions, human and nonhuman actors, and other social systems might investigations into the geologic require? And how might a practice of political geology - combining insights from political economy and geology – lead us toward new modes of inquiry, writing, and political organization?
Creative theoretical and empirical responses are sought for this paper session. Please send inquiries / abstracts of no more than 250 words to Kai Bosworth at boswo009@umn.edu by November 15. All conference participants must also register for the conference and submit an abstract at the conference website, www.politicalecology.org.
Possible topics include:
- Geologic capitalism
- Anthropocene geopolitics
- New mining technologies and techniques (hydrofracking, in-situ leach mining), spaces (boom towns, “mancamps”, deep sea or space exploration), and materials (rare earth elements, tar sands)
- Landscapes, ruins, and processes of ruination from past resource regimes
- Global infrastructure and the transportation of energy
- Geologic bureaucracy (Dept. of Energy, Bureau of Land Management, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, IPCC, etc.)
- Landfills, dumps, tailings and waste
- Environmental justice, toxicity and radioactivity
- Underground spaces and clandestine political ecologies
- Stratigraphy, paleoecology, and paleoclimatology
- Constructing resources and commodities
- Slow violence and deep time
Bibliography
Bebbington, Anthony. 2012. “Underground Political Ecologies: The Second Annual Lecture of the Cultural and Political Ecology Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers.” Geoforum 43 (6) (November): 1152–1162.
Braun, Bruce. 2000. “Producing Vertical Territory: Geology and Governmentality in Late Victorian Canada.” Cultural Geographies 7 (1): 7–46.
Bridge, Gavin. 2011. “Resource Geographies I: Making Carbon Economies, Old and New.” Progress in Human Geography 35 (6): 820–834.
Clark, Nigel. 2011. Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Elden, Stuart. 2013. “Secure the Volume: Vertical Geopolitics and the Depth of Power.” Political Geography 34 (May): 35–51.
Ellsworth, Elizabeth, and Jamie Kruse, eds. 2013. Making the Geologic Now: Responses to Material Conditions of Contemporary Life. Brooklyn: Punctum books. http://www.geologicnow.com
Mitchell, Timothy. 2013. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. 2nd ed. London and New York: Verso.
Scott, Heidi V. 2008. “Colonialism, Landscape and the Subterranean.” Geography Compass 2 (6): 1853–1869.
Yusoff, Kathryn. 2013. “Geologic Life: Prehistory, Climate, Futures in the Anthropocene.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 31 (forthcoming).
Yusoff, Kathryn, Elizabeth Grosz, Nigel Clark, Arun Saldanha, and Catherine Nash. 2012. “Geopower: A Panel on Elizabeth Grosz’s ‘Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth’.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 30 (6): 971–988.
Zalasiewicz, Jan. 2008. The Earth After Us: What Legacy Will Humans Leave in the Rocks? Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.
The post CFP DOPE 2014: Breaking Ground in Political Geology: Materials and Economies of Extraction, Energy and Earth appeared first on GeoCritique.
