Format/Structure

Single panel format with 4-5 presenters. If there is enough interest, we would be happy to coordinate two consecutive panels.

Long Abstract

Extraction has been ‘fertile’ terrain for political ecology, revealing the less visible connections between “polity, economy, nature and society” (Bebbington 2012, 1152), situating these relationships not only in a contemporary sense but historically. Resource extraction for new technologies like Blockchain-powered applications, Web3, cryptocurrency, generative AI/LLMs and large cloud servers has been considered a ‘new frontier’ for resource extraction. Critical approaches in the study of these technologies and their connections reveal intertwined stories of finance, land, and money. Bitcoin, for instance, is rewriting but also linked to historical geographies and processes of extraction (such as hydropower infrastructure), as “the material geographies of Bitcoin are highly uneven and intertwined with specific infrastructural, ecological, and economic systems” (Lally et al. 2022, 18). The impacts and legitimacy of the overwhelming energy, water, and space/land that are required are also being contested on multiple fronts, by a range of actors (Horst et al 2024, Howson 2021). This panel proposes to bring insights from work on the political ecologies of extraction and political ecologies of data together to critically think about these technologies, data, and their relationship to extraction as “governed, repaired, and reproduced by specific actors in specific places” (Nost and Goldstein 2022, 5) as way to consider what this new frontier matters for how we understand political-economic, social and ecological relations.

This Panel has 9 pending paper proposals.
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