Short Abstract:

This panel explores the re-negotiation of 'acceptable' forms and consequences of extraction under conditions of global, national and local crises that introduce temporal pressures to engage (anew) with African undergrounds.

Long Abstract:

In recent years apparent critical supply crises and geopolitical pressures around the globe have injected new demands for the extraction, processing and recycling of raw materials. Particularly in countries of the Global North, the temporal pressure to combat climate change and to ensure energy security became increasingly entangled with a “securization rhetoric around critical minerals” (Owen et al. 2022, 4). This also involves political quests for new techniques of extraction, and for ever new places where resources can be found (e.g. in residue sites, the sea belt, or space). The urgency to find solutions for the ‘here and now’ of differently defined crises, however, runs risk of downplaying the contestations around these projects, and seems to leave little room for long-term concerns about environmental viability and well-being in targeted areas on the African continent and beyond.

This panel invites contributions from various disciplines studying the relationships between locally, nationally or globally defined states of exception (e.g. environmental crisis, political turmoil, warfare) and temporalities of engaging with the underground. How do discourses about potential sites and technologies of extraction play out, and what are the politics of creating infrastructures and of making use of labour relations that support subterranean work? How does this eventually shift the ways the consequences and long-term impacts of extraction are(n't) addressed or made (in)visible? What afterlives of extraction are emerging on the African continent in reference to ‘criticality’, e.g. in the form of re-mining old mining territories or of recycling materials from consumer products?