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- Convenors:
-
Nikolaos Olma
(University of the Aegean)
Deana Jovanovic (Utrecht University)
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- Format:
- Workshop
- Transfers:
- Closed for transfers
Short Abstract:
This panel welcomes papers that examine how (post-)extractive communities navigate the intertwined (un)common and (un)commoning temporalities of (post-)extractivism, including the contradictions between narratives of progress and decline, and the tensions between remediation and irreversible loss.
Long Abstract:
The burgeoning literature on resource extraction and its afterlives has generated significant insights into the projected, imagined, and speculative futures that emerge after extraction ends. However, these futures represent only one of the many temporalities that (post-)extractivism produces while appropriating, exploiting, and uncommoning resources and landscapes. Economically disadvantaged communities often embrace extractivism as the only perceived path towards a more prosperous socio-economic future. Vice versa, as ore bodies are depleted and extraction sites become abandoned, former mining communities turn towards the past, invoking nostalgic narratives that romanticise the “golden days” of industrial prosperity. Museums transform the history of extractivism into a cultural legacy, overlooking or sanitising the associated hardships, sacrifices, and environmental degradation. And remediation efforts seek to return post-extractivist landscapes to an ambiguous and ahistorical “before,” a static state that denies the complex and layered temporalities of extraction and its aftermath.
This panel welcomes papers that examine how communities navigate the intertwined (un)common and (un)commoning temporalities of (post-)extractivism, including the contradictions between narratives of progress and decline, and the tensions between remediation and irreversible loss. What can extractive and post-extractive communities teach us about the broader politics of time in post- and late-industrial landscapes? How do they challenge or reinforce dominant understandings of progress, recovery, and nostalgia in the context of deindustrialisation and environmental harm? What do remediation practices reveal or obscure about the irreversible transformations wrought by extractive industries? And how is each of these practices involved in processes of (un)commoning time, resources, and landscapes?
Accepted contributions:
Session 1Contribution short abstract:
In Riotinto in southwest Spain, a long history of industrial mining has created its own mining society and culture. Corresponding values have been shaped by extractivism. Nowadays, narratives about the past and a waste dump in the contaminated landscape are triggering processes of uncommoning.
Contribution long abstract:
Processes of commoning in Riotinto have been ongoing since industrialisation when a British company opened what was then the largest copper mine in the world. The relationship people built with this extractive activity and the landscape is the basis for a culturally embedded mining identity. Above all, the extensive representation of extractivism in painting, poetry and photography testifies to this close relationship. Nowadays, while mining requires a far lower workforce, art is still a community-building experience, as it brings the collective activity of mining and life in the mine into the present and creates a common basis for exchange and identification. This reproduces values that recognise the hard and dangerous work of the miners and honour their contributions to modern, technological society and extractive practices. The article examines two uncommoning developments as well:
Different narratives of the mining museum and foundations define the history as British or even as Martian. At the same time, the inhabitants emphasize their own role in the transformation of the landscape in relation to the "foreigners" and the "company".
In the meanwhile, a toxic landfill leads to an encounter between waste and non-waste, reducing extractivist values to the absurd and thereby throwing norms and moralities into disarray. While people protest against the landfill, this could lead to a cultural change in the long term, where extractivism is possibly transforming into an uncommoning process. The article sheds light on cultural dimensions in the discussion about extractivism, resources and waste.
Contribution short abstract:
Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2022-2023, the paper focuses on two villages in the Thar Desert, in South East Pakistan, to show that how villages are demanding for yet another displacement.
Contribution long abstract:
The open pit mines of the Thar Desert, in the South east of Pakistan, cover a vast tract of land. As these mining projects are ongoing, villages and people find themselves at different stages of displacement. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2022-2023, the paper focuses on two villages to show that extraction encounters have no closure. The two villages were the first to be affected by the mining activities. After a brief moment of resistance and cooperation, disputes between the villages and the mining companies were resolved. However with time, the situation has become such that villagers are demanding to be ‘relocated’ again. The paper details the ongoing issues between the villages and the company and shows how these never extractive communities live constantly with feelings of fear, nostalgia, regret, but also with anticipation.
Contribution short abstract:
By tracing different perspectives on repairing a seemingly ruined future in Brumadinho, a mining community in southeastern Brazil severely affected by the collapse of a tailings dam in 2019, this paper scrutinizes the (re)configurations of temporal dimensions in the wake of extractivism.
Contribution long abstract:
Extractivism is an economy built on a temporal paradox: while it relies primarily on the materiality of past temporal layers, it simultaneously projects a 'utopian' promise of progress and prosperity. Therefore, 'crises' of such economies can radically challenge the established socio-political order based on common and commoning temporal configurations. This paper focuses on the mining community of Brumadinho, in the southeastern Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, and its ongoing confrontation with the consequences of a tailings dam collapse in January 2019: even after six years, the search for bodies and cleanup efforts in the devastated area are still far from complete. At the same time, however, the agreement that has promised and financed "full reparation" is about to deplete. How do (un)commoning temporalities contribute to the efforts to repair an extractive economy? By tracing different perspectives on repairing a seemingly ruined future in Brumadinho, this paper scrutinizes the (re)configurations of local temporal references in the wake of extractivism and its collapse. The idea of 'repair', as this contribution empirically illustrates, goes beyond the idea of a commonly accepted 'returning to the status quo ante'. Rather, local debates reveal a variety of reparative assumptions and aspirations that not only raise the question of future life in the region but also problematize what actually needs to be repaired and how this should be done.
Contribution short abstract:
The lifeworlds and temporalities of Lao miner-peasant communities are shaped by the seasonal cycle as well as the boom and bust cycles of the extractive industries operating in the area. This paper investigates the miners' shifting sense of time and perceptions of landscape transformation.
Contribution long abstract:
Lao miner-peasant communities in the tin mining area of Khammouane Province (central Laos) have followed seasonal cycles since precolonial times: the rainy season was reserved for wet rice agriculture while artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) formed the local livelihoods in the dry season. During the 20th century, this pattern shifted towards year-round mining (today, agriculture only amounts to a meager ten percent of people’s income). However, the seasonal cycle is still important, as dry and rainy season are characterized by different mining techniques. The Lao-Buddhist ritual cycle, which runs parallel to the seasonal one and shapes the lifeworlds and temporalities of Lao rice farming communities elsewhere in the country, has never lost its sociocosmological significance in this particular miner-peasant community.
Meanwhile, since the establishment of the first French colonial mining enterprises in the 1920s, large-scale mining has transformed social life and the physical environment in the tin mining area, adding another temporal dimension: the boom and bust cycles of extractive industries. Nevertheless, ASM remained the basis of local livelihoods and was sometimes even practiced on the site of industrial mines. Currently, the precarious co-existence between foreign mining operations and local ASM communities is under pressure due to recent trends of large-scale concessions granted to Chinese mining enterprises. Local Lao villagers now feel dispossessed and excluded from what used to be the common and collective property of “the people” in socialist Laos, creating a growing sense of rupture (instead of cyclical time) and nostalgia.