Paper short abstract:

TBC

Paper long abstract:

TBC

Paper short abstract:

I explore how a particular configuration of power based on the appearance of a predetermined hydrocarbon future was created out of a heterogeneous set of circumstances surrounding shale gas development. The analysis points also to multiple temporalities that unsettled the narratives of control.

Paper long abstract:

I explore how the power of the hydrocarbon futures has been created on the ground of shale gas activities in the UK and Poland. How is it possible that the future in those localities seems to be predetermined and out of reach for the local residents opposed to hydraulic fracturing? The development of unconventional resources in recent years has to be analysed as a key element contributing to the continuing power of hydrocarbon futures. What work is required to control the future in this way?

Shale gas developments in Europe have not moved beyond the exploration phase and it remains uncertain whether they ever will so the future of fracking is at the same time purely abstract and speculative as well as laden with the heaviest socio-political imaginaries. On the most basic level, shale gas developments and the attendant hydrocarbon futures can appear as predetermined/owned through the local work required to: build and maintain fracking infrastructures despite the unruly materialities on the ground and sustain shale gas as a viable and desired energy option in the face of popular resistance. I explore the formal and informal politics of time involved in the ontology of managing and contesting the hydrocarbon future by rendering visible the affective power of shale gas infrastructures, conspiracy stories and the unruly materialities of the subsurface.

I analyse these dynamics by drawing on three years of ethnographic and documentary research in Lancashire and the region of Grabowiec in Poland.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the temporal process of coltan-making, an high-value mineral extracted in Sierra Leone at the artisanal level. It shows how the process of coltan- and price-making is based on the possibility of managing the multiple temporalities of coltan mining.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the temporal process of coltan-making, an high-value mineral extracted in Sierra Leone at the artisanal level. Among the miners, doubts and perplexities about the real name and actual industrial uses of this mineral go hand in hand with the uncertainties that characterise its exchange value. Indeed, one of the main problems that torment these workers is how to determine the true value and the right price of a mineral that offers "fast money".

Drawing upon fieldwork experience in the mines of Sierra Leone (2007-2016), this paper focuses on the strategies adopted by a mining community to gain a degree of control over the local price of coltan. It shows how the process of coltan- and price-making is governed not only by market dynamics and powerful global actors, but also by local miners, traders, and traditional authorities' economic strategies. The cornerstone of these strategies is based on the possibility of managing access to the mines and (de)synchronizing the temporalities of coltan mining. By drawing upon the recent anthropological and philosophical debates on time, I endeavour to employ and develop the notion of plural temporality in order to grasp the material, ecological and imaginative aspects of the coltan production.

Paper short abstract:

This paper considers how resource-making in Kenya is articulated around the concept of permanence. Through various strategies deployed to materialise oil, what emerges is in fact a struggle over value. That is, the idea that some resources have the potential to create more wealth than others.

Paper long abstract:

What might a fruitful extractive encounter entail? The state of oil exploration in Kenya has given rise to tensions between market speculation, revenue anticipation and people's expectations particularly those in the host community- Turkana County. A region erstwhile considered arid and unproductive by the state. For many of my interlocutors and indeed others in resource extraction frontiers, the proof of progress is in how oil's transformative powers are deployed for good in concrete, tangible ways. Permanent houses of brick and mortar financed through wages from oil company employment, permanent employment that keep the wages coming, permanent roads that endure - in short, permanent development which ultimately speaks of connection. Thus, through its material arrangements, oil becomes an affective presence that animates landscape, redefines value, mobilises people into action, creates new social and political formations.

What this paper considers, are the ways in which resource-making endeavours in Kenya are articulated around the concept of permanence. Making capital stay and do good. Through anticipatory and negotiation strategies of national meetings, local dialogues, expert knowledges, situated politics and community protests around oil, I show how this assemblage reveals a struggle over value and competing resource imaginations. Exploring the pre-resource antecedents in Turkana County, I argue that the region's long history with transient development interventions have created a local defiance of market prospecting and techno-scientific logic as people seek to make speculation concrete.

Paper short abstract:

Taking the varied speeds of action(s) within the 25-year lifespan of the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline as the point of departure, this discussion centers on the assorted ways in which speed informs perceptions of and potential resistances to extraction at the scale of the grassroots.

Paper long abstract:

From exploration, design and engineering, negotiations, community engagement, construction and export to afterlife and on, complex socio-political changes and ecological shifts within extractive landscapes reflect the interactions and relations of and between spatiality and temporality. Taking the varied speeds of action(s) within the 25-year lifespan of the enduring Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline as the point of departure, this discussion centers on the assorted ways in which speed informs perceptions of and potential resistances to extraction at the scale of the grassroots in two communities in Cameroon. Early on, the spatial dispersal of the pipeline across the landscape, already fracturing dissent in particular ways, was compounded by the dual-speeds through which the construction (fast) and socio-environmental protection mechanisms (slow) were implemented. A focus on how and why grassroots communities come together reveals the importance of taking speed and the varied spatio-temporality of extraction into account: while spectacular events in extractive zones sometimes provoke immediate popular responses, the temporally protracted pre-extraction periods of potential and possibility in spatially disparate communities (i.e., the particular future-building characteristic of the pre-life of extraction) can re-direct community anxiety while fostering (unobtainable) anticipations of potential enrichment. Meanwhile, leaked internal documents from within the oil consortium reveal intentional attempts to 'buy time' and defer discontent from transnational NGO networks by lengthening or delaying discussions. In this context, resistance to extraction is better conceptualized as 'slow dissent', as the slowly unfolding recognition of the ecological and socio-economic changes escalates progressively.

Paper short abstract:

Despite extreme seasonality of water and a chronic shortage of electricity, Nepal's rivers function as foundation of an imagined "hydropower nation" whose citizens will become wealthy from their shares in export-oriented dams. China and India are simultaneously trying to secure those rivers' volumes

Paper long abstract:

Water in Nepal is highly seasonal: 50% of the annual precipitation falls on just 15 days while there is hardly any rain at all between October and April.  This has severe ramifications on Nepal's energy generation as it relies heavily on hydropower. Therefore, while some of the run-of-the-river projects produce more energy than the transmission lines can carry during monsoon, in winter Nepal has to import large quantities of electricity from India. Only with the recent completion of a major new transborder transmission line a decade of daily scheduled brown-outs (with up to 14 hours of power cut on winter days) has come to a close. Yet for some years now, a substantial part of the political and economic elites have been collectively engaged in the construction of a vision for the future of Nepal that denies all of these fluid complexities. Instead, in this telling, water and gradient are the ingredients for future wealth through the export of electricity. Every drop of water that leaves the country's borders without producing hydroelectricity is imagined as wasted. Out of this rationale, we argue, emerges a double movement of securing these volumes: on the one hand the attempt to secure the potential physical sites for hydropower projects; on the other hand the effort to securitize the financial assets necessary to develop them. And with the high interest of both India and China in developing Nepal's rivers, their volumes turn into complicated flows of territoriality.

Paper short abstract:

Tracing the material and symbolic life of abandoned oil wells, geological knowledge, and state practices, this paper examines the political futures and pasts about national sovereignty that conspiracy theories around oil discovery and abundance generate in Turkey today.

Paper long abstract:

Following the material and symbolic life of abandoned oil wells in southeast Turkey, this paper examines the ways in which prospects and/or failures of economic oil discovery generate new speculative pasts and futures. According to a widespread conspiracy theory today, in the year 2023 - the centenary of the founding of the Republic of Turkey -, the Treaty of Lausanne that internationally recognized the establishment of Turkey in 1923 will expire and Turkey's modern borders become obsolete. Those who believe in the theory claim that the Treaty of Lausanne included secret clauses that up to this day, prevented the Turkish state from having full sovereignty over its underground resources and thereby extracting its abundant oil reserves. In this paper, I trace the political projects attached to the year 2023, which is both the alleged expiration day of Lausanne and a highly significant date for the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). The AKP has set 2023 as the year in which a set of ambitious economic goals will come to fruition and Turkey will become an economic powerhouse, simultaneously mobilizing it as a temporal device of historical revisionism. This paper examines the ways that geological knowledge and non-knowledge about the underground fuel these sovereign futures and pasts in Turkey today. In doing so, this paper not only shifts attention towards the materiality of conspiracy theories, but also highlights the ways in which state power and politics of temporality are increasingly imbued with earthly matters in our political present.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores temporal dynamics that have arisen in the aftermath of a gold rush in eastern Cameroon. Divergent temporalities are enacted within and between techniques of resource-making that attempt to fold the past and future into the present whilst articulating imaginings of generativity.

Paper long abstract:

This paper proposes an account of artisanal gold mining in eastern Cameroon and the temporal experiences and materialities that emerge from the recent arrival and departure of Chinese mechanised mining companies. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic research with Gbaya mining communities, I analyse how the ensuing gold rush and radical depletion of the landscape's gold stocks have transformed a remote border region into a space of rapid socio-economic change, where the Gbaya continue using informal and makeshift mining practices to extract ever smaller quantities of gold left in the wake of the Chinese whilst declaring that "the gold is gone".

Through a focus on the materiality of gold extraction, this paper considers how divergent temporalities are enacted in and transformed within technical processes of resource making. It shows how the future end of gold is brought into the present, quickened through the continued extraction of residual gold, which mobilises the vitality of the past through cyclical techniques of repetition and mimicry. In the afterlife of gold, complex temporalities are technically layered and folded into a constant 'present-ism'.

I argue that the shift from material abundance to resource scarcity has created a radical sense of discontinuity and put into motion new and conflicting temporal dynamics between everyday practices of subsistence. The temporal rhythms, cycles and scales of cultivation, hunting and artisanal mining articulate points of cosmological convergence and divergence that reveal underlying (traditional and emerging) imaginings and desires surrounding understandings of the generativity, luck and value of gold.

Paper short abstract:

I identify the social costs of extraction in Papua New Guinea's Kutubu Oil Project through an examination of how the capitalist discourse accompanying the transformation of nature into a resource for development diminishes egalitarian principles whilst creating instability and fragmentation.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I will discuss the relationship between the resource (oil), dominant capitalist discourse and the emergence of individualism in Papua New Guinea. I show how this relationship typifies development processes where the capitalist economic system facilitates individual economic self-interest, impeding (established) social cohesion rather than facilitating 'sustainable' environments. I am concerned with how individual pursuit amongst the Fasu, hosts to Papua New Guinea's Kutubu Oil Project, is altered when new meanings and values are attributed to daily life. Formal leadership, structured types of representation, capital generation, private property ownership, and all-purpose cash, are just some examples of the types of discourse an oil economy (and its interwoven politics) imposes. I identify the social costs of extraction through an examination of how emerging market relations based on oil royalties diminish egalitarian principles and alter individual agency and boundaries of practice. I argue that the attenuated form of personal gain encouraged by the type of capitalist competitive market individualism promoted in resource environments can create instability and fragmentation, a 'footprint' that populations are left to deal with once the resource is left in its natural state.