Send message to Author

Short abstract:

Viewing copper as both material condition and heuristic object at the intersection of technoscience and environmental justice, this essay considers how copper's properties have informed our assumptions about efficiency, resilience, and connectivity as economic and social virtues—to unsettle them.

Long abstract:

Too often, we ignore the relationship between our imaginaries and, as Anne Pasek writes, “the material idiosyncrasies of the object we have on hand to think with” (2023, 17). By thinking with copper, a highly conductive element that has played a central role in industrialization, digital computing, and green technologies, this paper asks what copper is conducive of, both materially and conceptually, within green economies. It traces copper—a technology-agnostic material—throughout seemingly disparate, multiscalar, and multi-sited histories to unravel the ways in which Quebec’s vision of economic and environmental sustainability is predicated upon epistemic assumptions, social relations, and economic structures that have been, at least in part, historically co-constituted by copper’s elemental idiosyncrasies and pervasive infrastructural presence. Viewing copper as both a material condition and a heuristic object that lies at the intersection of energy governance, technoscientific expertise, and environmental justice, this paper considers how the properties of copper—conductivity, ductility, and low reactivity—have informed our assumptions about efficiency, resilience, and connectivity as material, economic, and social virtues.

Drawing on historical studies of energy forms, knowledge, and power, and copper’s discursive figurations and infrastructures, this short historical and speculative essay will look at the convergences between copper, science, and clean growth, to reveal how the patina of Quebec’s green economy has been weathered by cybernetic cultures, oppressive cultural norms, and uneven geographies of human and nonhuman harm. This offering to the materials library seeks to unsettle these norms and decouple sustainability from efficiency, to rethink copper's elemental possibilities anew.