Short Abstract:

This roundtable convenes researchers approaching “care” and “extractivisms” ethnographically. Bringing together scholars working at sites of planetary resource extraction with those probing digital surveillance, we consider how technoscience enables care that extracts vital relational energies.

Long Abstract:

This roundtable convenes researchers approaching “care” and “extractivisms” ethnographically, using each concept to critically engage with the other. Within STS, care has been scrutinized as an object of ambiguous desire, anxious attention, and indeterminate achievement (Murphy 2015; Puig de la Bellacasa 2019; Linden and Lydahl 2021). Meanwhile, critical extractivism studies exist in the long colonial shadow of resource extraction (Jalbert et al. 2017, Arboleda 2020), but now also considers popular markets (Gago 2017) and data mining (Mezzadra and Neilson 2017) as key sites for the accumulation of surplus value (Halpern et al 2022). What can each of these avenues of critical inquiry offer each other? Forms of care are often fetishized as hopeful aspirations to tend better to the self or to live better with others, yet the execution of caring relations can themselves manifest cruelly (Berlant 2017). And while extracting from care relations is not novel to colonialism and capitalism, contemporary forms of technoscience offer new conduits for extracting value through the production of “care” in increasingly precarious times. Under the aegis of unending and intersecting political, economic, and ecological crises (Masco 2017), care technologies rush forward to resolve or even anticipate (Adams 2009) emerging disasters in ways that also reinforce existing extractive and surveilling apparatuses. By bringing together scholars working at literal sites of planetary resource extraction with those probing atypical sites of extractive analysis, such as digital surveillance, this roundtable considers how contemporary technoscience engages and enables practices of care that simultaneously extract or destroy vital relational energies. To open the roundtable for discussion, participants will engage these concerns from their ethnographic fieldwork in diverse settings, including management of environmental and forensic data, surveillance infrastructure, digital extractivism and the toxicity of extractive economies. Roundtable participants: Vivian Choi, Norma Möllers, Noah Tamarkin, and Theodora Dryer.