Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenor:
-
Syed Shoaib Ali
(Southasia Institute of Advanced Studies, Kathmandu, Nepal)
Send message to Convenor
- Chair:
-
Rohit Negi
(Ambedkar University Delhi)
- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract:
We invite attention to the aftermath of diverse industrialisation projects in the global south, as sites of renewed epistemic and social action for justice, liveability, and prospects for flourishing.
Long Abstract:
Several strands of 21st-century scholarship on the Anthropocene point to "the end of the world”. The end is less an end of life in itself, but more an end of the world we came to know over the last 500 years of enlightenment, industrialisation, and progress. It turns out that the challenges of living on a finite planet may have less to do with the Malthusian concerns of productivity and overpopulation, and more to do with the aftermath of industrial “piping”, “burning”, “crowding”, and “dumping” (Tsing et al., 2020) in what it took to get here. As rising temperature, sea levels, air pollution, toxic chemicals, and depleted biomes come to play leading roles in what the ecologists have come to see as the “sixth mass extinction”, histories of piping, burning, crowding, and dumping point to the deep inequities of industrialisation and progress alongside manifold erasures of life and places.
Kim Fortun (2012) calls this moment “late industrialism”. Late characterizes asthmatic exhaustion from the lack of air to breathe, where people end up choking on the very stuff that was meant to provide growth. Late also captures a loss of faith in the epistemologies organized under the rubric of scientific knowledge (Todd, 2018). Late also points to a “phase shift” (Choy and Zee, 2015) that consists of new actors, coalitions, and networks that propose to revitalize the prospects for liveability.
For this panel, we are particularly interested in global south scholarship that pieces the aftermath of diverse industrial worlds. This includes new tools, retrofits, infrastructures, and designs for social and epistemic action. The point is not to overemphasize the mess as the end, but what counts as liveability, justice, and prospects for flourishing despite it. The panel is interested in forms of environmental thinking, practice, organizing and change after apocalypse.
Accepted papers:
Session 1S.L. Nelson (University of Sussex) Kate O'Riordan (University of Sussex)
Short abstract:
This paper examines and critiques how the biotechnological process of reviving extinct species perpetuates neocolonial power structures at the expense of global extraction sites.
Long abstract:
This paper critically examines de-extinction, or the transformative process of recreating extinct species through biotechnology, and its neocolonial implications. We argue that de-extinction narratives, while promising ecological restoration and reparation for the damages caused by colonialism, perpetuate neocolonial power structures. De-extinction projects drive benefits to Western technoscientific industries at the expense of historically colonised extraction sites, thereby replicating colonial power dynamics through contemporary technoscience. Focusing on the woolly mammoth, thylacine, and northern white rhino, we trace the flow of these technoscientific networks from Western scientific hubs (e.g., in the US, the UK, and Europe) to extraction sites in the Arctic, Tasmania, and Kenya respectively. We employ a postcolonial approach to 1) analyse the historical and ongoing impacts of colonialism and neocolonial technoscience in these regions, including resource and data extraction (Wrigley, 2023), labour exploitation (Frei, 2018), and exclusionary conservation practices (Bersaglio and Margulies, 2021); and 2) critique dominant Western narratives that frame de-extinction as an exclusively benevolent, reparative science. Our methodology involves database development and digital mapping to document and trace the relationships between actors, networks, and materials in de-extinction projects. Our analysis is informed by scholars such as Kashwan et al. (2021), Duffy (2022), and Dowie (2009), who highlight the persistence of colonialism and racism in global conservation philosophies and practices. By challenging dominant perspectives, our study reveals the complex interplay between de-extinction, ecological revival, and the perpetuation of colonial power structures. This insight is crucial for understanding the broader implications of biotechnological transformations on a global scale.
Pankaj Sekhsaria (Indian Institute of Technology - Bombay)
Short abstract:
This abstract responds to the call of this panel by (re-) emphasising and (re-) producing another tale of apocalypse in the making. It is a manifestation that late-industrialism is no longer a 'moment' but a steady state of the planet's existence.
Long abstract:
The late-industrialism of tomorrow is being created continuously, as the world we have known continues to be pushed to the edge. The pre-industrial is losing out to the late-industrial even as imaginaries of re-making hark back to the values and valuation of the worlds that are on the brink of loss. An account is needed of the pre-apocalyptic world to be able to make sense of the impending change of and after the apocalypse.
This story is of recently the approved Rs. 72000 crore (US$ 10 billion) mega infrastructure project in Great Nicobar Island, India. It involves the construction of a port, an airport, a power plant and greenfield township in a land and seascape that this is extremely rich biologically, is home to indigenous communities that have been living here for 1000s of years and is located in the world's most seismically volatile zone.
The site of the project in only about 100 nautical miles from the epicentre of the 9.3 Richter scale earthquake of 26 December 2004, one of the biggest recorded earthquakes and one which killed killed thousands of people besides damaging property worth billions of dollars.
The paper asks a question of the wisdom and the validity of locating a port along this coastline. Ignoring the scientific evidence of the tectonic reality and volatility is an invitation to disaster the risks of which can simply not be managed.
Kencho Peldon (The University of Queensland)
Short abstract:
The paper will analyse the role the law played in transforming the colonial industrial-agricultural production of British India. Specifically, it considers the British state's intervention in the cotton production supply chain to examine the implications on society, biotechnology and the law.
Long abstract:
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the British government looked at the Colony of India as a potential alternative source of long-staple cotton fibre supply for Britain’s rapidly growing cotton textile industry. This decision was based on several factors: Indian farmers had extensive knowledge of cotton cultivation, production and cotton thread spinning; local handloom weavers had already produced and exported fine cotton textiles to England; and the British colonial administration in India had the political and economic means to leverage upon the local cotton production to increase cotton supply for industrial needs of Britain. Using cotton regulation in British Colonial India as a case study, I look at the role the law played in transforming colonial agricultural production. The history of the British state’s interests in the control of plant materials can be examined by following the cotton laws and regulations which came to intervene in the local cotton supply chain, and eventually, controlling the plant's biological material. I argue that the legal regulation of cotton as a biological material resulted from the gradual transformation of post-harvest crop production across the cotton supply chain. Examining cotton production in British India through cotton germplasm transplantation, scientific experimentation, crop modification, and standardisation allows for rethinking the origins of genetically modified crops (Bt cotton) and biotechnology regulation on society and the environment in the colonial/post-colonial context.
Archana Pathak (Indian Institute of Technology Mandi)
Short abstract:
The paper deliberates on ecological destruction caused and awaited in the Eastern Himalayan Borderlands due to the incessant construction of mega-infrastructure projects by focussing on the everyday lives, imaginations, and experiences of the people inhabiting the region.
Long abstract:
The recent Glacial Lake Outburst flood caused due to the bursting of South Lhonak Lake led to monumental increase in water levels of the Teesta River leading to unprecedented destruction in the Eastern Himalayas regions of Sikkim and Kalimpong. Towns built on the banks of the river like Melli, Singtam, through which the National Highway 10 (NH 10) passes, saw complete destruction to life and property. In that context, this paper deliberates on the unplanned and haphazard urban infrastructure creation in the Himalayan towns along this highway, which is the only road connecting Sikkim to the rest of the country. It will look into the infrastructural intrusion in the region, which has overtime inverted the ecological balance, thereby making such infrastructural spaces more vulnerable in events of climatic extremes. As states and companies alike are using techno-fixes, to try and mitigate against a voluminous earth in revolt, the paper will focus on the everyday lives, imaginations, and experiences of the people inhabiting these mountain towns and their way of dealing with constant vulnerabilities. Based on the ethnographic fieldwork along with archival sources, the paper will engage with the working of infrastructure and its invisible effect on the ecological, climatic, and shaping of place and landscapes such as town/urban areas. Additionally, it will also focus on how the quest for ecological justice requires centring colonialism and the continuation of colonial policies by the postcolonial state to facilitate discussion on the Anthropocene in the Global South.