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- Convenor:
-
Pauline Georgiou
(University of East London)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Monday 25 October, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel will consider literal and metaphorical narratives of decay, and the conservation opportunities that can emerge from them
Long Abstract:
Decay, often seen as the enemy of conservation, can be host to a multiplicity of life forms and opportunities, both literally and metaphorically. The natural cycles of life must also be considered worthy of protection and a shift in the narrative can reconsider decay as a beginning or continuation rather than an end. This panel seeks to bring together work on indigenous and humanistic and post-humanistic narratives of decay to challenge normative conservation practices and engage with non-interventionist methodologies. This will provide a productive space for the reconsideration of conservation processes that interject nature for the sake of development. The panel invites papers that explore the theme of decay within the context of nature and heritage conservation, identify alternative conservation methodologies that embrace processes of decay, or that consider decay as a metaphor for the exploration of the conference themes.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Monday 25 October, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
The paper would explore the ways in which waste in the urban can be studied as intimate infrastructure. Looking at Mumbai ethnographically, the focus is on the politics of waste as a responses to speculative futures,which are political, affective, cultural, economic and social.
Paper long abstract:
Since the last twenty years India has been experiencing a significant rise in affective engagements relating to waste. These discourses are adept in looking at the environmental and economical networks that underlie the systems of waste in India's cities, but do not necessarily map out the social and ecological.
The paper looks at Mumbai, and more particularly the Deonar Dumping Ground (which is the city's largest and one of Asia's oldest landfills), and explores the multiple architectures and geneologies of waste in the lives of people who work/live with it. This helps in throwing light to the ways in which work, life and discrimination intersect each other while people try to adjust to waste and politically make sense of their lifeworlds. By using the ethnographic method, I plan on exploring the margins where the binaries of legal/illegal, moral/immoral, official/unofficial are transgressed, and structures of intimate ambiguities become salient. The paper raises questions of waste as infrastructure- is it to be understood as a technological or biological or social system (Zaloom 2006; Elyachar 2011)? Or is it a combination of all three, based in everyday rituals and practices?
Within the urban in India, there is a need to articulate the material informal politics of waste as a response to speculative urban practices of the present. These speculative practices do not promise ideal solutions but lead us towards a challenge of balancing toxicity and waste's normative powers.
Paper short abstract:
Focusing on the (hi)stories of vultures, humans and livestock in Europe, this paper considers how divergent understandings of decay and well-being are imagined, enacted and valued within landscapes that are becoming at the same time more homogeneous and fragmented, more toxic and sanitised.
Paper long abstract:
European vulture species, share a long history with farming practices to an extent to which they have learned to subsist predominately on the remains of livestock carcasses left in the fields. They have also been subject to long-term conservation efforts aiming to bring back locally extinct species.
Yet in 2002 an abrupt rupture occurred. In an attempt to halt the spread of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) the EU introduced strict hygiene rules that prohibit the leaving of carcasses in the open. Keeping European landscapes tidy and sanitary had an adverse effect on European vulture populations and ran contrary to environmental legislation that aimed at their restoration and conservation. As the starving of vultures and their alleged turn into predators killing lambs alarmed local farmers and people involved in vulture conservation (for different reasons) – an exception specifically for vultures has been negotiated, which re-allows the leaving of carcasses under specific circumstances and in defined places.
Using a more-than-human lens, this paper elucidates how the entangled (hi)stories of vultures, humans, livestock and others allow for a consideration of how divergent understandings of decay and well-being are imagined, enacted and valued within this context. Paying attention to the world-making activities of scavengers, I will argue, allows us to reconnect thinking about multispecies survival with the life giving unravelling and consummation of decaying flesh. Scavenging in this story emerges as a lively world forming activity, which challenges the late modern quest to live without death in sanitised and impoverished worlds.
Paper short abstract:
This paper investigates the concept of decay in heritage spaces. Through an observation of spaces of decay due to conflict and abandonment, notions of heritage are challenged. Heritage interventions are considered as interruptions of natural processes of decay, and relations to authenticity.
Paper long abstract:
In Cyprus, a place of conflict, the Buffer that separates the two communities of the island is a space of abandonment. Since the 60s, within the buffer zone has lied abandoned an area of urban and natural decay. The buffer divides the capital city and its walled old town, at times seeping and blending into its surroundings and at others materialising as a stark reminder of the past. This paper investigates the spaces of urban decay within and around the buffer, that have in recent years become the subject of conservation, restoration and preservation. The main arguments challenge the ethical aspects of heritage-making, that interrupt natural and social lives that have thrived in the abandonment. The paper then raises questions of heritage authenticity considering posthumanist approaches to decay. In places of conflict where the narratives of heritage are politicised and contested, the dominant narratives remain in history through diplomatic violence and erasure. The paper turns the lens towards the weeds and wildlife, the graffiti artists and (internal and external) refugees, the trespassers and developers that frequent the buffer zone area to consider the life of abandonment and challenge the value of normative heritage processes.