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Accepted Contribution:
Prospecting hope: proximate, millenarian, and ordinary futures at the prospectors and developers association of Canada
Steven Jackson
(Cornell University)
This paper reports on mechanisms of hope operative at the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada, the world’s largest annual mining convention. It explores proximate, millenarian and ordinary hopes, and how such hopes travel from sites of extraction to sites of planning and calculation.
Long abstract:
This paper offers a field report on the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada, the world’s largest annual mining convention held each spring in the mineral city of Toronto, home to 75% of the world’s mining companies. It explores the forms and complexities of hope operationalized in such environments, from the proximate to the millenarian to the ordinary, and how these hopes are enacted, circulated, and contested over the course of a four-day mining convention. It also explores the movement(s) of hope, across registers from the technoscientific to the ecological to the political, and the sometimes not-so-seamless webs of hope that emerge. It documents the mechanisms by which hope is made to travel (via images, via numbers, via people) from sites of extraction to sites of planning and calculation, and what hopes get dropped and picked up along the way. Building on long-standing STS precepts and principles, it argues for a richer and more symmetrical treatment of hope in and around technoscientific and wider extractive projects; and the central role of hope at the heart of expert calculation.