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Short abstract:

This interrogates a storied earth shipped between hemispheres. The clay’s sacred uses by the Darug people of Sydney attracted attention. The vat of clay transported to Joseph Banks in 1790 became the subject of scientific experiments into a new ‘primitive earth’ or ‘terra australis’.

Long abstract:

'Terra Australis' follows the maritime journeys of a vat of clay mined in the 1780s from the lands of the Eora/Darug people of Sydney Cove, Australia, which Josiah Wedgwood transformed into a series of medallions representing a fanciful colonial future. Manufactured in three different hues, Wedgwood invited Erasmus Darwin to write a poem to accompany the design, which was then reproduced in the journal of the inaugural Governor of New South Wales, Arthur Philip, and it also became part of a longer work on botanical gardens. The allegorical figures on the medallion evoked the Greek myth of Pandora and the figure of Hope. This project adopts a deep history approach; by juxtaposing the long geological histories of this 'sacred clay' alongside Indigenous Australian worlds, we can explore the storied deployment of these particular earth samples and their exchange and return between knowledge hemispheres. Banks sent samples to leading scientists across Europe, including Blumenbach, who each experimented with the clay and came to conclusions about the nature of the earth of this distant land, largely unknown to Europe. Via the intimate negotiators of the British Enlightenment's colonial projects, which included measuring, mapping and dividing up this southern earth into lots for distribution to its military men and later to convicted felons, this project aims to expand the ambit of planetary history. The paper will be informed by the work of Elizabeth Grosz and Kathryn Yusoff.

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Short abstract:

I examine how complex and shifting ideational claims on Himalayan geology have come to play a paramount role in ascribing value to sediments as well as classifying what sediments are of value.

Long abstract:

To the average geoengineers and hydrologists, sediment flows in the Himalayan rivers were erratic, regular, and unknowable, one of their constitutive elements being that they ruined lives and infrastructure, without any one geological force clearly being at fault. This disciplinary thought not only rendered geology governable but also the moving earth of the Himalayas measurable. But Himalayas are young active orogenic mountains, they are still moving upwards, and as a result, thrusting downwards. So, the theory of ‘value’ to reckon the nurturing levels of sedimentary flows proved rather difficult and gave rise to multiple levels of doubt about the accuracy of geological knowledge of sediments. Yet this calculative regime has become central to the political economy of the Himalayan geology. Here, I examine how complex and shifting ideational claims on Himalayan geology have come to play a paramount role in ascribing value to sediments as well as classifying what sediments are of value. Through geohistorical analysis, ethnography, paper research and interviews among the geo-hydro-scientists who collect sediment data, I explain the multiple modes and expressions in which geological forces of the Himalayas graft onto social forces thereby evoking future possibilities about extraction, politics, and environment.

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Short abstract:

This presentation explores human-lithic intimacy and acts of bereavement within the science of paleontology that open possibilities for nonviolent ways of being in the geological sciences and industries.

Long abstract:

This presentation explores human-lithic intimacy within the science of paleontology in the contemporary United States. It takes as its ethnographic touchstone my observations of the grief that paleontologists, fossil excavators and preparators feel for the long-dead animals whose fossilized remains they work with. In these moments, unburying, cleaning, and preparing fossils for storage are affective acts of bereavement as much as they are scientific practices. To understand this form of mourning, I bring Butler’s grievability (Butler 2009) and Ogden’s “affective resonance” (2021) into conversation with Myers’ analysis of scientific research as “a full-bodied practice” in which “seeing, feeling, and knowing are entangled” (2008, 2). As a subfield of geology, paleontology offers a counterpoint to discussions of geological exploitation and the violence of geological relations. I present human-lithic intimacy as a relation of “geontopower” (Povinelli 2016), but one that does not abide the distinction between bios (life) and geos (nonlife) that Povinelli argues is crucial to modern power. Moreover, the human-lithic intimacy that exists within paleontology opens possibilities for nonviolent ways of being in the geological sciences and industries more broadly.

I am open to sharing these ideas through a paper presentation and/or a dialogue discussion.

Butler, Judith. 2009. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? Verso.

Myers, Natasha. 2008. Molecular Embodiments and the Body-Work of Modeling in Protein Crystallography. Social Studies of Science 38(2):163-199.

Ogden, Laura. 2021. Loss and Wonder at the World's End. Duke University Press.

Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2016. Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Duke University Press.

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Long abstract:

Glasgow, like many places in the UK, sits on top of abandoned, flooded coal mines from the late 19th and early 20th century. The British Geological Survey is currently investigating whether the water in these mines could be used to heat homes in the city through geothermal energy as a form of low-carbon energy. This paper discusses the slippage between the Geological Survey's institutional and material history and its entrenched epistemological and extractive practices and its more recent desires to use geoscience for low-carbon energy futures.

The science of geology, in its utilitarian and imperial form that developed in Scotland and England in the late 18th and early 19th century, has been (and remains) a major epistemological force that helped map subsurface resources, not only in the UK but across the British Empire and adjacent to it. Geological research and its inhuman territorializations aided in colonization, Indigenous erasure and dispossession, and the creation of global mining industries (Chakrabarti 2022; Zeller 1987; Zaslow 1970; Yusoff 2018).

Yet, the British Geological Survey argues that their work in Glasgow signals a “step change in our understanding of geology and our relationship with the underground environment” (www.bgs.ac.uk, “UK Geoenergy Observatories”). In this paper, which follows from my work as 2024 SGSAH EARTH scholar at the University of Glasgow, I aim to take seriously what this “step change” really means and if it signals a shift in the forms and formats of geology and the political power it enacts.

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Short abstract:

This essay details the non-linear and more-than-human effects of differently bodied human engagements with differently grounded wetland ecologies surrounding Lake Erie’s Western Basin–a watershed marked by histories of settler colonial terraforming and the toxic spectacle of harmful algal blooms.

Long abstract:

This essay details the non-linear and more-than-human effects of roughly two centuries of differently bodied human engagements with differently grounded wetland ecologies surrounding Lake Erie’s Western Basin–a watershed situated in the once-frontier territory of middle America, most recently animated by the toxic spectacle of harmful algal blooms (HABs). More specifically, it considers the draining of a vast indigenous-occupied wetland region known as the Black Swamp by white settlers at the turn of the 19th century alongside emergent state efforts to “restore” such drained wetland ecosystems via “data-driven” methodologies that seek to balance watershed-scale nutrient exchanges between humans and algae via the computational affordances of algorithms. Framing the former as an instance of 19th century geo-engineering intended to mitigate the racially contaminating effects of indigenous swamp atmospheres on white settler bodies and the later as an instance of 21st century terraforming intended to mitigate harms associated with the water body of Lake Erie, I provincialize such distinct framings of bodily harm so that the problem of HABs may be disarticulated from the desires of settler territoriality and algorithmic resource governance. Contrary to a landscape history which would understand such earthly engagements as pre-defined practices executed upon pre-existing grounds by pre-existing subjects, I story a history of Lake Erie that brackets such entities–and Lake Erie itself–as secondary effects of historically and materially contingent modes of body-ground experience. In doing so, I aim to effect new grounds for a politics of harm beyond algae to cohere.

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Short abstract:

Grounded on an analysis of Earth system sciences discourse, this paper offers a critique of "global habitability" by questioning the implicit holocenic norms on which it seems to be built. Then, it questions these norms from an anti-colonial point of view.

Long abstract:

This exploratory paper offers a problematization of the planetary predicament considered from the point of view of geopower. In order to do so, I examine closely the notion of “global habitability” as it has been cast thought Earth system sciences. First, I recall how this notion has been a central part of global environmental discourse by analyzing how it emerged as a key element in the context of the birth of the “Earth system sciences” during the 1980s. Then I show how the contemporary Earth system sciences encode the notion of global habitability through a double link between a concept of “civilization” and the concept of Holocene. My point here is to underline why Holocene is framed as the state of the Earth to be preserved: it appears to be precisely because it has been historically constructed as the geological age of “civilization” by the colonial geo-epistémè in the 19th and 20th centuries and its cultural aftermaths (e.g. Jonsson 2015 ; Whitington 2023). Then, I argue that normative assumptions of “global habitability” need to be de-naturalized for the “habitability” not only corresponds to holocenic territorializations rather than a universal “civilization” (e.g. Greaber & Wengrow, 2021), but also denies the many ways humans have inhabited Earth and land. As a consequence, we have to ask what remains of “global habitability” considered from an anti-colonial point of view. While praiseworthy, the attempts to integrate justice in the planetary boundaries framework do not interrogate these crucial issues (e.g. Rocktröm et al. 2023).

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Short abstract:

Through critical and artistic research, I will unpack the Western colonial imaginaries of restoration and repair that inadvertently work to achieve idyllic bodies and landscapes using the Toronto Port Lands as a case study.

Long abstract:

I am an artist with invisible chronic illnesses that developed while I lived on a mass of land built out of Toronto’s waste at the edge of Lake Ontario called the Port Lands. While seeking medical care, I witnessed attempts to heal the Port Lands. In a purification project the City of Toronto has called “Naturalizing the Port Lands”, two million cubic meters of contaminated soil are being excavated or washed in order to restore the land to its supposedly original state. The contaminated earth can’t be disposed of- only moved elsewhere. I will critically unpack the Western colonial imaginaries of restoration and repair that inadvertently work to achieve idyllic bodies and landscapes, using the washing of the Port Lands soil as a case study and a metaphor for cleansing the body.

Environmental scholars argue that our view of nature is rooted in expectations of what health should look like (Soper, 1995; Betcher, 2015). The treatment of bodies and lands are both enacted through parallel systems of care that aim to reinstate subjects to a particular picture of health rooted in a binary healthy/sick, natural/unnatural. But chronically ill bodies and contaminated lands neither get well nor die, unsettling the idealized visions of repair. Through research and creative practice, my work explores how concepts of “nature” can impact and our relationship to land and bodies. I will unpack how Western colonial imaginaries of restoration and repair present in ecology and geology exhibiting human imagination as an ecological force.

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Short abstract:

High-temperature geothermal energy is a pioneering case of deep-rock geoengineering that emerged in the 1980s. We follow the confrontation between human attempts at structuring new productive 'strata' and terrestrial intensities that possess their own dynamics.

Long abstract:

This contribution looks at the history of high-temperature geothermal energy (HTG), a pioneering case of geoengineering that emerged in response to the oil crisis in the 1980s. GHT aims at creating geothermal "loops" in the deep underground, thanks to the collaboration of various engineering fields (oil fracking, nuclear waste burial). The operation seeks to passage open passages in the deep rock by fracturing it, and to create circulations that allow fluids to be injected and the high temperatures of the deep rock to be recovered. It takes us from the concept of High Dry Rock [HDR], which originated in Los Alamos in the 1970s-80s, to the later Enhanced geothermal system [EGS], in Europe in the 1980s.

We follow the ups and downs, but also the international structuring of this technology and its transformations in the face of the failing response of the successive sites (anomalies, basement outcrops) to which it is applied. The inconsistencies between the scientific vision of and experience with the (sites) deep rock prompt disciplinary shifts (solid mechanics, geology, hydrogeology) and a further exploration of the complexity of underground circulations, opening up to geological knowledge.

The analysis takes a "political geology" approach, and questions the way in which humans articulate themselves with terrestrial intensities that possess their own dynamics (Clark, Neyrat). It questions the possibility of knowledge and power over these entities, and the way in which their materiality challenges both scientific visions and the ambition to constitute new productive 'strata' (Clark; Yusoff).

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Short abstract:

This paper explores how German mining professionals shape the ethical legacies of mining projects in the Global South. It critically examines how they position themselves as technology developers and just transition makers, while neglecting their contribution to socio-environmental injustices.

Long abstract:

While the discipline of geology is often assumed to be “only about rocks”, authors have highlighted its significance for colonial relations of power (Hecht, 2023; Yusoff, 2022). Conversely, individual professionals and professional societies, are increasingly pushing for just and sustainable practices in contexts of mineral extraction (see Ayeh & Bleicher, 2021 on the emerging field of ‘geoethics’). At the surge of global demand for Energy Transition Minerals and Metals (ETMs), this paper studies German mining professionals’ roles in implementing these ‘sustainable mining’/’mining for sustainability’ agendas at home and abroad. With virtually no active metal mining projects in its own country, German industry and society is highly dependent on raw material imports. At the same time, though, the mining heritage in former areas of extraction such as the Ore Mountains finds its expression in the export of ‘sustainable’ technologies, know-how and ideas.

Based on multi-sited ethnographic field research in different sites of the German mining community (e.g. industry conferences, transdisciplinary workshops, policy events) and qualitative interviews conducted in the German Ore Mountains, the paper explores the specific roles of white geoscientists and mining engineers in shaping the sustainability and justice legacies of mining projects in the Global South. Instead of doing ‘dirty’ mining jobs, professionals increasingly position themselves as ‘transition makers’ that contribute to the material basis of global energy transitions. Yet by promoting technological solutions to complex arrays of socio-environmental injustices in contexts of extraction, they usually neglect their own role in shaping powerful geological relations and sustainable futures.

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Long abstract:

The drawing of a line is the making of a world. It is this sense of mapmaking, as a post-representational practice, that both catalyzes and beguiles contemporary thought and action in cartography. However, all lines are not created equal. They may disguise or disclose the techniques of their making or the burden of significance they carry. Line widths and weights. Pattern and repetition. Then and now, the work of signifying the real begins with a simple question: how to re-present, well?

By examining the writings, drawings and exercises in muscular coordination by Erwin Raisz (1893-1968), I suggest that cartography was uniquely important as a pedagogical method in the early-to-mid-20th century. Of course, drawing and diagramming has long been an important aspect of the classroom. What is unique in this moment of US history is how mapmaking aligned importantly with the turn toward a global perspective in education – a turn that was also evident in popular periodicals like Fortune and Life. Since the Second World War, new geospatial technologies and techniques of geographic analysis have been inserted into the classroom, with both specific and general effects on the role of geography in American society. At stake then is how we might think the linkages between cartography and geography today, to amplify the work of drawing, diagramming, and mapmaking – and to think these linkages in terms of geographic education.

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Long abstract:

Modern concrete, the dominant construction material in Mexico City, has a useful life of about 100 years. After that, it begins its useless life, which tends to be much longer. But in some places, the useless life of concrete begins well before its useful life has ended. This is especially true in Mexico City, where earthquakes, subsidence, decay, injudicious construction, and a corrupt real estate sector conspire to prematurely trigger concrete’s useless life. Sinking foundations, cracking walls, leaning buildings, and caving roofs are but some of the indicators that mark the onset of concrete’s decline. For residents of useless concrete, buildings become two things simultaneously: a home that houses all the securities (and violences) of domesticity, and a geological entity, distant and predetermined. Framing this overlap of the useless and useful lives of concrete as "geological simultaneity", this paper draws on 30 months ethnographic research in Mexico City to ask: How do people feel at home in a present that is being swallowed by deep time? How do people inhabit buildings that are as much homes as they are avatars of future collapse? I suggest that while deep time is often understood as something utterly removed from human experience, inhabiting the useless life of concrete introduces a geological axis to everyday life, compelling attention to the deep time of the present.

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This paper positions models as particular digital objects that are part and parcel of climate technologies. Starting with climate science, an Earth systems model is a proxy that does the work of standing in. It replaces the overwhelming complexity of the climate that can only be apprehended via producing a synoptic form, an abstraction. The endeavour of modelling Earth systems seems predisposed for incremental discovery only if one assumes a fixed ontology that becomes calculable with increased computational power. Yet such objectivism is challenged by manifestations of agencies that for Stengers (2014) invoke the name of Gaia and to which Clark and Szerszynski (2020) respond with the idea of planetary multiplicity: a restless planet that is “self-incompatible,” “out of step” with itself, and “self-differentiating.” This paper asks how physical, aleatory uncertainty shapes these models, introducing an interplay of aleatory and epistemological certainty and uncertainty, constituting models as uncertain mediations of uncertainty. Furthermore, my paper suggests how the resulting interplay of certainty/uncertainty of models resonates in actionable climate technologies that draw on climate science but also displace it by extending abstraction into agendas of manipulation. Climate technologies constitute planetary predicaments (Whitington and Oguz 2023) in that planetary processes are abstracted and calculated but remain speculative and “shot through with alterity, uncertainty, and apprehension” (155). Referencing concrete, actionable models that in one way or another adapt features from climate models, I gesture toward the various ways in which uncertainty is alternatively erased, translated, externalized, exploited, cultivated, et cetera.

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Long abstract:

In June 2015, amidst soaring temperatures, severe electricity and water shortages, and the ban on selling food and water during Ramadan, hundreds collapsed on the streets, in their homes, on buses in Karachi. On the edges of morgues and graveyards, the dead were overflowing into visible public space on the streets. Drawing on media studies, infrastructure studies, and environmental humanities, the 2015 Karachi heatwave created, what I call, “a thermal ecology” that exacerbated and reconstituted existing entanglements between media processes, urban infrastructures, and the aggravating impacts of climate change. I demonstrate that the heatwave built on existing political marginalization and environmental ruination to generate new forms of media activism, urban digital governance, and data surveillance. To develop this argument, I trace Karachi's media ecology as embedded within and conditioned by infrastructures of breakdown and repair, and histories of inequitable and violent growth that has ruined the city’s ecology. I analyze how the heatwave mediates and intervenes in forms of urban digital governance, data surveillance, and media activism. While recent scholarship attends to the tremendous heat expended by digital media infrastructures (Velkova 2016, Hogan 2015, Ruiz 2021 to name but a few), this paper examines the thermal effects (Starosielski 2021) of heat upon media ecologies and the social and ecological lifeworlds within which they are embedded. It argues that this thermal ecology and its infrastructure failure needs urgent examination, since the material force of heat is an ongoing condition and marked future of climate change for billions in the global south.

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Long abstract:

Taiwan's semiconductor manufacturing industry, anchored by TSMC, produces 90% of the world's high end chips, and has been dubbed by former president Tsai Ing-Wen "Taiwan's Silicon Shield." This paper explores the geopolitics of semiconductors through the geophysics of Taiwan's seismically active and now drought-prone landscape. It proposes that, in addition to exploring the geology and politics of supply chains for rare earths and semiconductor materials, that the geopolitics of the Taiwan Strait status quo, if Tsai is to be taken seriously, is grounded in longer histories of seismic, hydrological, and change, grounded in the East Asian developmental state as, effectively, a spot-terraforming power. In developing a mode of landscape ethnography that thinks special economic zones that produce the semiconductors that underlie technological modernity - now explicitly redeployed as a war over the hardware that, for now, grants US allies a technological edge - as a different kind of shield: like a shield volcano: a tectonic formation grounded in landscape processes that are deeply tied with specific networks of policy anxiety, the memory of earthquake disasters, the increasingly minute, atom-level scales, at play in semiconductor manufacturing, all of which imply seismic action into the very manufacturing processes that amplify and also hold off aggression across the Taiwan Strait. Landscape ethnography, I argue, helps to reroute political science and logistics-supply chain accounts of geopolitical tension by insetting those into practices of managing geophysical pressure.