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Paper short abstract:

Informed by fifteen months of fieldwork in India's Sundarbans, the paper considers how energy developments may be extractive of care in its practical, affective, and temporal declinations.

Paper long abstract:

Over the past decade, critical perspectives have shed light on the social and environmental justice implications of a growing low-carbon energy industry. Some of these perspectives have emphasised the structural continuity between carbon and low-carbon energy developments, potentially no less extractive in nature. More nuanced perspectives have shown how extractive projects may be motivated by moral imperatives, notably the imperative to care about climate change, thereby asking the uncomfortable question of the violence that care might do. In this paper, I propose to pursue the focus on care to highlight the need for maintenance of low-carbon energy infrastructures and technologies, and the demands these make on those who care for them in practice.

Building on Tronto's (1993) classic definition of care as a life-sustaining practice that consists of four distinct phases (caring about, taking care of, caring for and being cared for), I show how care is constantly demanded by technological arrangements always vulnerable to disrepair, and at the same time how care is demanding of work, affect and time. The paper expands our understanding of what energy developments are extractive of - not simply of mineral resources or land, but of care in its practical, affective, and temporal declinations. Rather than resistance, such perspective thus emphasises persistence (Povinelli 2011) as a form of slow violence (Nixon 2011) that might be obscured by a narrow definition of extraction.