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Accepted Paper:
Mediating infrastructural instability: On riverine weed along the Mekong and structureless soil in the highlands
Huiying Ng
(Rachel Carson Center, LMU Munich)
Composed across multiple materialities in the context of Southeast Asian border landscapes, this paper questions and refines the concept of re-peasantisation, and asks how feminist intergenerational structures take up the work of organising futures-in-common.
Paper long abstract:
Platform capitalism and land financialisation have created new scenarios for power to work at a distance, making the asynchronous experience of shared time acutely visible. This paper draws on supply chain studies’ attention to infrastructural instability to theorise the Mekong river as a holding space of structural stability: organizing the seasonal transformations of an ecological commons, bringing mica and flood sediments from upstream tributaries to seasonal wetland forests. Here, trees and riverbank gardens grow after the monsoon, becoming food and shelter for birds and people. Upstream dam infrastructure blocks these sediments, and water releases for cargo shipping disrupt the growing conditions for a submarine riverine weed. Elsewhere, Chiang Rai's red soil slips away along the hills. As Akha learn to live with coffee—a cash crop they are asked to grow in place of banned opium—they have also learnt to grow it for a commercial market. But learning to increase coffee’s yield for a commercial market departs from caring for the land; and Akha are still caught between cash crop and national park mapping that leaves little room for biocultural structures of stability. Specialty coffee markets, organic produce and medicinal herb production offer other options, but require planning and intergenerational agreement to synchronise cultivation, harvest, and markets, while managing the liabilities of input-dependent commercial crop markets. Composed across multiple materialities in the context of Southeast Asian border landscapes, this paper questions and refines the concept of re-peasantisation, and asks how feminist intergenerational structures take up the work of organising futures-in-common.