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- Convenors:
-
Stephanie Postar
(London School of Economics and Political Science)
Negar Elodie Behzadi (University of Bristol)
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- Stream:
- Climate Change
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 16 September, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Anthropologists and geographers have worked for decades to share narratives about encounters with the extractives industry. This panel invites scholars to turn the lens inwards to examine and advance our (multi)disciplinary approaches to such story-telling in this time of climate crisis.
Long Abstract:
Anthropologists and geographers have worked for decades to share narratives about the lived experiences of encounters with the extractives industry (including oil and gas, minerals, as well as logging and other types of resource extraction), highlighting different forms of exclusions and resistances that result from such encounters. This panel invites scholars to turn the lens inwards to examine and advance our (multi)disciplinary approaches to such story-telling in this time of climate crisis. In particular, this panel asks to what extent conversations - methodological and theoretical - between anthropological and geographical perspectives and ways of writing on resource extraction, can contribute to (re)theorise, make visible, as well as challenge and resist extractive violence and exclusions. What are anthropologists and geographers' responsibilities for finding new ways to chronicle extraction in the Anthropocene (Deborah Bird Rose, Juanita Sundberg) and how can disciplinary cross-fertilisation help us do so?
To answer these questions, this panel invites contributions that open theoretical conversations on resource extraction and: 1) 'the non-human', indigenous knowledge and ontologies, and multispecies perspectives (Bakker, Sundberg, Nuttall, Tsing); 2) feminist post/decolonial approaches (Murrey, Behzadi); and 3) political ecologies of exclusion and resistance (Le Billon, Peluso), including through activism. This panel encourages interrogating researchers' role in challenging the extractive characteristics of research on resource extraction in geography and anthropology. We will discuss different disciplinary relationships with ethnography, as well as push the methodological boundaries of research on resource extraction by examining new 'earth writings' beyond texts through the use of visual, digital, performance and art-based approaches.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 16 September, 2020, -Adrienne Johnson (University of San Francisco)
Paper short abstract:
I advance critical possibilities for conducting careful engaged research with company actors, with the recognition that the offered possibilities are highly contingent on the reshaping of major research concepts around feminist and relational perspectives.
Paper long abstract:
'Engaged research' has become an important concept in human geography and anthropology research design. The prioritization and inclusion of 'collaboration', 'partnership', and 'participation' is considered a strong indicator of sound critical research - research that seeks to challenge unequal spatialized structures of power, domination, and injustice. In resource extraction research, engaged research agendas are often pursued alongside marginalized groups with the intention of empowering them and positively transforming our world. Although this approach is needed, I argue that it may create grounds for a 'missed opportunity'. Drawing on company research in Ecuador's palm oil industry since 2011, I argue for a critically engaged research agenda that is anchored by working relationships with 'oppositional' actors - actors whose views may run counter to the researcher's own perspectives.
I advance critical possibilities for conducting engaged research with company actors, with the recognition that the offered possibilities are highly contingent on the reshaping of major research concepts around feminist and relational perspectives. Additionally, I acknowledge that the ability to actually carry out such research is highly dependent on the intersectional identity of the researcher being congruous with the racial, gender, and class structures that constitute and maintain the organization being studied. Engagement with companies is possible if: 1) a 'messy' interpretation of the researcher's shifting identity in the field is acknowledged, 2) a composite approach to the corporate firm is pursued and 3) a conceptualization of critical engagement is formulated which recognizes the political and social constraints surrounding research in oppositional spaces.
Pauline Massé (Université Lumière Lyon 2)
Paper short abstract:
A multi-sited ethnography of the mining elite which supports France's mining renewal reveals certain facets of the State : the entanglement of public and private's sectors ; a colonial way of seeing future spaces of extraction and its inhabitants ; the world as a playground for geological conquests.
Paper long abstract:
We propose to analyze the French State through what we call its mining elite: the one supporting the mining renewal policy. The multi-sited ethnography we conducted on its members shed light on some aspects of the State.
First, circulations of the mining elite between various sectors (from State's technical organisms or high-level administration to multinational firms, and vice versa), as well as the way the renewal policy is constructed (with mining firms and historical corporatist associations) tend to show a consequent entanglement between 'private' and 'public' sectors.
Second, specific spatial imaginaries emerge from mining elite's discourses. They reveal a colonial register, through the way the elite considers future mining projects' territories (as empty spaces that need to be developed and defined by resources they contain), moreover its inhabitants (as violent and-or ignorant). Dissymetric discourses insures a duality between the inhabitants (colonized populations) and the elite (colonizers), and show a more global process of detachment from the sensible world. The renewal policy can be thus seen as a form of 'internal colonization' by the State of some parts of its territory.
Also, the world appears to be the reference's spatial scale in these discourses. The mining elite tends to consider the State's space and the world's the same way: as a gigantic playground for geological conquests. This refers to the way the French State constructed itself: through resources' exploitation of other territories than its own ; through a position that makes the most of globalized resources' flows in the various world-ecologies.
Diana Salazar (University College London)
Paper short abstract:
This paper reflects on the possibilities of exploring an environmental history of La Guajira, Colombia, that connects local struggles of indigenous and afro-descent groups affected by coal extraction from London-based mining multinationals, to networks of solidarity between the UK and Colombia.
Paper long abstract:
This paper reflects on the possibilities of exploring an environmental history of La Guajira, Colombia, that connects local struggles of indigenous and afro-descent groups affected by coal extraction, to networks of solidarity between the UK and Colombia. The research uses participatory action research to produce with some leaders of affected communities, an environmental history of La Guajira, from the 1970s, that is embedded in the history of social struggles of communities affected by coal extraction from London-based mining multinationals, and to explore the role of networks of solidarity between the UK and Colombia in disrupting the violation of human and environmental rights produced by coal extraction. The research is framed as activist-academic, whereby my work as an academic researcher is linked to my activist practice as part of international networks of solidarity.
The approach to environmental history derives from Indian and Latin American scholarship, which is embedded in the history of social struggles, linking the protection of the environment to a strategy of subsistence. The fieldwork takes place between Colombia and the UK and is integrated with annual events organised by solidarity movements - as part of an annual summer international delegation to Colombia, and an annual autumn Speakers' Tour of mining-affected guests to London.