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- Convenors:
-
David Humphrey
(University of St Andrews)
Kirsten Campbell (Loughborough University)
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- Stream:
- Irresponsibility and Failure
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 31 March, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
The global challenges of the Anthropocene have mobilised ambitious projects of social, environmental and moral transformation in the service of utopian futures. This panel explores how those involved with such projects experience their failings and attribute blame and responsibility for them.
Long Abstract:
The contemporary global challenges of the Anthropocene have engendered large-scale projects of moral, environmental and social transformation. These projects often feature starkly contrasting representations of the future, between apocalyptic scenarios and utopian, transformational visions. They frequently carry a strong moral dimension, in the form of mass attitudinal change, and ambitious policy commitments. Whatever the merits of such projects on their own terms, those involved in them frequently experience a degree of failure to live up to exacting ideals (Mosse 2005, Riles 2011), perceptions exacerbated by the high political stakes involved.This panel seeks to explore the dimensions of responsibility and blame in perceived failings relating to initiatives in fields such as sustainable energy production; the conversion of economic systems to sustainable bases; ecosystem management; and biodiversity conservation. How do different groups make sense of them? How is the responsibility for failure constructed and reconstructed between these groups and in what ways do they take, allocate and avoid blame (Rudiak-Gould 2019, Laidlaw 2010)? What are the criteria, institutional, instrumental or moral, by which different groups judge function and dysfunction? How does the casting of blame intersect with colonial legacies and/or social structures around gender, race, class, religion or caste? What personal narratives do people mobilise to make sense of failings? And what are the productive potentialities of attributions of failure?Participants are invited to engage with both empirical and theoretical approaches to understanding responsibility and blame within such projects, intersecting with these questions, or posing new ones of their own.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 31 March, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
The state-mediated transition of all farming in the northeast Indian state of Sikkim to organic methods has been branded variously as anything from a 'lighthouse to the world' to a 'sham'. I examine the ways in which officials frame the possibility of failure in this 'organic conversion'.
Paper long abstract:
The state-mediated transition of all farming in the northeast Indian state of Sikkim to organic methods has been branded variously as anything from a 'lighthouse to the world' to a 'sham'. I argue that the frequency of criticism of this 'organic conversion,' and in particular of the role of officials in it, produces a general climate of everyday failure. In contrast to this, I examine a specific instance of contested ascriptions of failure in the certification of land as organic. I conclude that these specific contestations may serve to articulate the possibility of failure by making it salient from the ground of the general and the everyday, enabling officials and contractors to react to its possibility and adapt.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines various publics' and the New Zealand governments' attempts at fostering transformational politics during the Covid 19 crisis.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines transformational politics led by state governments in times of crisis. Taking as its case study the 2020 lockdown in Aotearoa/New Zealand in response to the Covid 19 pandemic, it examines affective relations between citizenry and the state, exploring how notions of responsibility, obligation, community and care are harnessed across governmental and public moves to constitute a comprehensive lockdown. In a situation where failure is pitched as unthinkable, how are compliance, success, safety, and blame constituted? Bringing together scholarly understandings of states of emergency and examinations of the competing responsibilities inherent in advanced liberal government, it interrogates the ways in which individual, collective and state responsibility are simultaneously thrown into relief and reconfigured in times of crises.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the narratives of blame within the perceived failures of off-grid solar micro-grids in eastern India. Based on ethnographic accounts of India’s first ‘smart’ micro-grids, it deconstructs the contentious narratives of failure between those designing and those using the system.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the narratives of responsibility and blame within the perceived successes and failures of off-grid solar micro-grids in eastern India. Solar micro-grids, within the wider off-grid energy movement, have been touted as a ‘silver bullet’ technology in rural development and electrification discourses, fulfilling virtuous narratives of sustainability and green energy while promising technocentric visions of ‘modernity’ and ‘progress’ in remote and marginalised areas. While these innovations leverage impressive investment and funding opportunities, the ground reality has arguably failed to realise these aspirations. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at the site of India’s first ‘smart’ solar micro-grid, installed in a tiger reserve in Odisha, this paper interrogates how the perceived failures of these projects were made sense of within both technical engineering communities and within the communities of users. It focuses on the dissonances between these groups in how they perceived the project, as well as the ideologies, beliefs and understandings which ultimately cast specific actors as agents of this failure. This paper argues that the failure of such projects are ultimately a product of the deconstruction of the technologised ideal of rural development and a subsequent decentred reassembly of such interventions within the framing of localised knowledges and subjectivities. The attribution of responsibility for this, however, becomes a contented and morally loaded issue, with overlying class, gender and caste tensions.
Paper short abstract:
Wildlife managers and Arctic Indiginous peoples have been locked in a debate of blame and responsiblity over the reproduction of keystone species. This paper examines the cases of Cold War muskox translocation and woolly mammoth de-extinction as a recurring debate on how best to encourage life.
Paper long abstract:
Wildlife managers and Arctic Indigenous Peoples have been locked into a centuries-old debate about how best to curate the lives of Arctic megafauna. Through examining the cases of the Cold-War translocation of muskoxen from Canada to the Soviet Union, and the recent attempts to resurrect woolly mammoth by applying gene splicing technology, this paper teases out the circuits of blame and responsiblity articulated by state managers and local residents. Broadly framed within the mythic theme of the Pleistocene Extinction, applied wildlife managers seek to restore lost populations presumably ravaged by primitive hunters wielding advanced stone tools, foreshadowing the 20th century arms race. In this case, settler urban scientists frame themselves as redeeming the faults of the forebearers of Indigenous citizens. The attempts to retrobreed wooly mammoths require a broader alliance of recruiting Indigenous hunters to prospect frozen carcasses from melting permafrost layers in North Central Siberia. The experimental laboratory methods, however, pull on late Enlightenment tropes of judgement and gaze giving scientists the power to "make live and not let die" (Kowal & Radin 2015). These methods sit in uneasy debate with local cosmologies which experience life in a less than literal way, and always in a moral dialogue with those on the surface. The paper concludes with an argument about a broad way to reimagine the potentialities of life, which speaks to the case for multiple and reinforcing cosmopolitics.