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- Convenors:
-
Ifor DUNCAN
(Goldsmiths University of London)
Nile Davies (University of Sussex)
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- Stream:
- Climate Change
- Sessions:
- Monday 14 September, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel considers the entanglement of human bodies and landscapes through "ecologies of harm" - the complex imbrications of political and environmental violence. Such scenes, we posit, are made visible in a variety of ways, through a range of sites and histories, scales and economies.
Long Abstract:
This panel considers the entanglement of human bodies and landscapes through what we term "ecologies of harm" - the complex imbrications of political and environmental violence. Such scenes of entanglement, we posit, are made visible in a variety of ways, through a range of sites and histories, scales and economies.
Toxicities endure in our ecosystems, revealing the intimate attachments between chemicals and bodies and they cross and join scales of analysis (Agard-Jones 2013). At the same time, critical turns towards "elemental" political technologies appear to offer alternatives to received ontologies of nature/culture and strict "person/thing" distinctions (Gómez-Barris 2017).
Governments harness watery forms as a means of statecraft ("hydropolitics"), mobilising rivers and dams as weapons and borders. Wildfires and deforestation enact the enduring "ruination" of colonial dispossession, chiming with the interests of extractive capitalism. Recent crises such as the poisoning of Flint, Michigan reveal the convergence of market forces with the logics of environmental violence, entailing the necropolitical valuation of life as resource or collateral damage. In cities particularly, declarations of "urban blight" have coincided with the spectacle of unnatural disasters, epidemics and environmental emergency, producing zones of exception that effect the marginalisation of the powerless (Klein 2007).
Such examples offer up a troubled archive of effects and afterlives, revealing the convergence of populations and ecosystems, as well as the adjacent logics of statecraft and late-capitalism. We welcome grounded methodological proposals that reveal distributions of power and the array of relations, materialities and scales that constitute contemporary social ecologies.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Monday 14 September, 2020, -Sarah de Leeuw (UBC Faculty of Medicine, UBC UNBC)
Paper short abstract:
Geopoetics are garnering increased attention as a methodological approach in geography. Part long-poem, part exploration of anti-colonial feminist engagement with British Columbia's second largest watershed (The Skeena River watershed), this paper explores poetry as critical ethnography.
Paper long abstract:
Geopoetics, which intersect in structural and conceptual ways with ethnographic methods, are garnering increased attention as a methodological approach in geography. Part long-poem, part exploration of geographically-informed and place-based anti-colonial feminist engagement with British Columbia's second largest watershed (The Skeena River in northwest Canada), this paper explores poetry as critical ethnography. The paper responds to calls for new modes of representing and being in the world, exploring how writing can be formalistically renovated (at the scale of letters, words, sentences, and ever paragraphs and pages) for resonance and impact, both of which have implications for considering watersheds in times of extraction and environmental devastation.
Imani Jacqueline Brown (Goldsmiths, University of London)
Paper short abstract:
In the US state of Louisiana, the fossil fuel industry maintains the spatial, environmental, and economic logic of colonialism and slavery. This presentation will posit legal and conceptual strategies to visualize and rupture Louisiana's 300-year extractive continuum.
Paper long abstract:
In the US state of Louisiana, the fossil fuel industry maintains the spatial, environmental, and economic logic of colonialism and slavery. Since 1926, oil and gas companies have dredged 10,000 miles of access canals to drill over 75,000 wells throughout the Mississippi River Delta. These canals usher saltwater from the Gulf of Mexico into freshwater wetlands, precipitating widespread vegetation death and sediment erosion. 1,900 square miles of wetlands have disintegrated at one of the fastest rates in the world, along with a critical buffer between coastal communities and the hurricanes and rising seas of the Gulf.
Louisiana's frontline communities are also at the fencelines of the nation's most polluting petrochemical plants, which occupy the footprints of sugarcane plantations in a region known as 'Cancer Alley'. An endemic yet uncharted feature of this wetland-plantation-plant landscape are mass graves of enslaved Africans. From the coast to Cancer Alley--from the well hole, through the pipeline, to the plant--one can traverse the self-contained yet disintegrating landscape of fossil fuel production.
A single parcel of private property contains the beginning and end of Extractivism. The well hole bored into Louisiana's ground is a wormhole. Primordial extinction events, colonial discovery doctrines, racial terror, and profit motives swell upward through geologic and atmospheric strata, rupturing into the present as oil geysers, human remains, carcinogenic emissions, microplastics, and free radical cells, and weeping against the horizon as climate change. This presentation will explore legal and conceptual strategies to visualize and rupture Louisiana's 300-year extractive continuum.
Rijul Kochhar (Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT))
Paper short abstract:
Under the concept of "cosmotechnics", this paper explores the mythical, scientific and ecological matrix constituted at the confluence of the rivers Ganga and Yamuna in Allahabad, India. How're imaginations of the water's anti-bacterial properties articulated in idioms of faith, filth and the phage?
Paper long abstract:
In the city of Allahabad—located at the confluence ("sangam") of India's largest rivers, Ganges and Yamuna—ritualistic dips in sacred riverwaters are revered for their believed curative power against infections as well as salvation from karmic cycles of birth and rebirth. The sacred and geographic propensities of the sangam—and its Kumbh Mela pilgrimage—have mythic valences in Hinduism, yet the curative riverwaters also have a basis in microbial physiology: near here, the British bacteriologist Ernest Hanbury Hankin, in 1896, first described the "bactericidal action of the waters of the Jamuna and Ganges rivers on Cholera microbes", predating the "discovery" of bacterial viruses by at least two decades. Pursuing the record of these purificatory waters of the sangam in sacred Sanskrit writings and folklore, and later elaboration in the work of Hankin, this paper traces an 'epistemology of time' that connects the mythic to the post-Hankin modern scientific. I explore how the phage comes to be spoken about amidst a plurality of practitioners, within secular and sacred epistemes of infection and riverine pollution, and in histories arcing from the ancient religious literature to colonial disease control efforts, to today, where bacteriophages are being conceived as potential response to the crisis of planetary antimicrobial- resistance (AMR). Allahabad, thereby, presents a "cosmotechnics" of infection, purity, and memory wherein faith, filth, and phage are inextricably intertwined. In doing so, this paper pursues the technical, yet protean, object of the bacteriophage through multiple slices of particular cosmologies that populate the historico-mytho-scientific arena of Allahabad.