The Anthropology of Mining Network panel Extractive governmentalities: articulating top-down and bottom-up views will take place in The 17th EASA Biennial Conference EASA2022: Transformation, Hope and the Commons 26th-29th of July, online or in-person in Belfast.
Panel Convenors:
Panel description:
The extractivist enterprise, as an integral aspect of global capitalism and in particular of recent promises of the "energy transition" (Dunlap & Jakobsen 2020), continues to expand into Southern and Northern rural peripheries. In the context of the environmental deterioration and conflicts resulting from these ("green") extractive activities, there is a growing interest in the power relations that shape interactions between companies, governments, residents of extractive zones and social movements (Frederiksen & Himley 2020). This panel intends to explore governmentality (Foucault 1991) as a theoretical framework to study such interactions around the extractive frontier (Coleman 2013; Van Teijlingen 2016; Buu-Sao 2021). We invite papers that address (one of) the following sets of questions.
On the one hand, the panel aims to deepen understanding of top-down extractive governmentality: what apparatuses (Foucault 1980) are produced by the promoters of extraction to render it possible and legitimate? What are the power/knowledge mechanisms at play at the extractive frontier? On the other hand, the panel wishes to take a more contextualized and ethnographic perspective "from below", that reveals how targeted populations appropriate, reject or twist governmental programs (Li 2007). What responses and forms of agency do attempts to govern provoke? What knowledges do people inhabiting extraction sites produce and how do struggles over knowledge and truth take shape? In articulating top-down and bottom-up views of extractive governmentalities, this panel intends to shed light on processes of normalization and subject-formation that the extractive industries set in motion in both Southern and Northern sites of extraction.
Instructions:
Would you like to present your work in our panel? Please submit your paper proposal by searching for the panel here. Your paper proposal must consist of: a paper title, the name/s and email address/es of author/s, a short abstract of fewer than 300 characters, and a long abstract of fewer than 250 words. Deadline for submission is March 21, 2022. Please note that to submit a paper proposal, you don’t have to pay anything yet.
If you would like to get in contact with us, please write to doris.buusao@univ-lille.fr or karolien.vanteijlingen@ru.nl. You can find more information about the conference theme, registration fees etc. here.