RGS-IBG Annual Conference, London, 29th August – 1st September 2017
 
Resource Temporalities: Anticipations, Retentions and Afterlives
Session Convenors: Dr Kärg Kama (Oxford, Geography) & Dr Gisa Weszkalnys (LSE, Anthropology)
Deadline: 5th February 2017
 
Recent work in resource geography and anthropology has demonstrated the need to move beyond issues of resource control and distribution toward a critical examination of how resources are made (Bridge 2013, Kama 2013, Li 2014, Richardson and Weszkalnys 2014). A focus on resource-making draws attention to the distributed quality of resources as always in-becoming, rather than biophysically or geophysically given, substances. It also reveals their indeterminate and often speculative nature as the outcome of a variety of techno-scientific, governmental, entrepreneurial, and financial practices (e.g. Majury 2014, Valdivia 2015, Weszkalnys 2015, Zalik 2015). Inherent to this process of resource-making are important temporal aspects, which have remained remarkably underexplored. In this session, we take the existing literature as a springboard to ask new questions about the multiple temporalities generated by processes of resource-making ranging from anticipations of resource matters, to their diverse retentions, to other temporal and material states once processed or unmade as a resource.
Resource-making rarely follows a linear trajectory. Its projected successes are often no more than a grasping for self-fulfilling prophecies, and its achievements are partly bound to the legacies of past and present resource production through types of path-dependency and lock-ins. Current examples of resource-making projects highlight their incremental yet spatio-temporally contingent nature, including the mortgaging of hydrocarbon futures by emerging producer states, a practice recently called into question by falling oil prices; the constitution of “reclaimed” landscapes in the context of mine decommissioning and closure; the production of overinflated resource estimates in the quest for “unconventional” fossil fuels and novel extractive spaces (e.g. ocean seabeds); as well as the specific modes of financialisation now encountered at resource frontiers, which produce various absences and presences across the domains of science and market. Important questions are also raised by the parallel life of extractive waste products and by projects of resource-making that have been blocked or indefinitely postponed due to scientific, political, or economic factors.
We invite papers that explore the diverse engagements with time that underpin these and other resource-making endeavours, drawing on a range of methods and trans-disciplinary analytical approaches. Contributions may address (but are not limited to) the following themes:

• Anticipatory politics: collective imaginations, expectations and projections that portend specific resource scenarios, and their relation to foresight, prophecy and divination
• Epistemic reconfigurations: Knowledge controversies that shape forms of epistemic authority and expertise around resource-based ventures, and the relationships between different sources of anticipatory knowledge (e.g. technocratic, corporate and community-based).
• Resource affects: the affective, experiential and embodied encounters with resources that project and attribute capacities to resources, beyond the “here and now” of resource extraction, into the past and the future
• Transubstantiation: Resource potentiality and the transformative effects of calculation, mapping, selective mining, refinement, and other forms of conceptual or geo-chemical processing. How has the increasing financialisation of resource production reinforced notions of purely speculative gain and the de-coupling of material and economic resource natures?
• Resources of the future: temporal and material practices that contribute to the conjuring of “novel” resources and extractive spaces, such as unconventional fossil fuels, geothermal energy, deep-ocean polymetallic nodules, atmospheric commons, but also the medical reconfiguration of human bodily substances as resource in the context of clinical trials
• Parallel lives: what happens to extractive waste and other unintended byproducts as they take on a life of their own in the shadow economies surrounding resource exploitation?
• Afterlives: how are resources unmade when extractive projects fail, are decommissioned, or closed? How do experiences with past “resources of the future” echo and reverberate in current resource-making efforts?
• Methodological innovation: ethnographic, participatory, activist, experimental and response-able forms of research.

Please send your abstract (150 words) to both Kärg Kama (karg.kama@ouce.ox.ac.uk) and Gisa Weszkalnys (g.weszkalnys@lse.ac.uk) along with your full contact details. The deadline for abstract submission is 5 February 2017.
For more information on the conference, please see the following link: http://www.rgs.org/WhatsOn/ConferencesAndSeminars/Annual+International+Conference/Annual+international+conference.htm

Understanding Material Loss Across Time and Space Conference
17-18 February 2017, University of Birmingham
https://understandingmaterialloss2017.wordpress.com/
Understanding Material Loss intends to examine the usefulness of ‘loss’ as an analytical framework across different disciplines and subfields, but principally within historical studies. Loss and absence are slowly being recognized as significant factors in historical processes, particularly in relation to the material world. Archaeologists, anthropologists, philosophers, literary scholars, sociologists and historians have increasingly come to understand the material world as an active and shaping force. Nevertheless, while significant, such studies have consistently privileged material presence as the basis for understanding how and why the material world has played an increasingly important role in the lives of humans. In contrast, Understanding Material Loss suggests that instances of absence, as much as presence, provide important means of understanding how and why the material world has shaped human life and historical processes.
Speculative and exploratory in nature, Understanding Material Loss asserts that in a period marked by ecological destruction, but also economic austerity, large scale migration and increasing resource scarcity, it is important that historians work to better understand the ways in which humans have responded to material loss in the past and how such responses have shaped change. Understanding Material Loss asks: how have humans historically responded to material loss and how has this shaped historical processes? The conference will bring together a range of scholars in an effort more to begin to explore and frame a problem, than provide definitive answers.
Confirmed keynote speakers include:

• Professor Pamela Smith, History, Columbia
• Simon Werrett, Science and Technology Studies, UCL
• Professor Maya Jasanoff, History, Harvard
• Professor Jonathan Lamb, English, Vanderbilt
• Professor Anthony Bale, English and Humanities, Birkbeck
• Astrid Swenson, Politics and History, Brunel

Understanding Material Loss seeks to uncover the multiple practices and institutions that emerged in response to different forms of material loss in the past and asks, how has loss shaped (and been shaped by) processes of acquisition, possession, stability, abundance and permanence? By doing so it seeks to gauge the extent to which ‘loss’ can be used as an organizing framework of study across different disciplines and subfields. Understanding Material Loss seeks papers from across a variety of time periods and geographies. Although open and speculative in nature, this conference will focus on three broad topics within the wider rubric of loss, in order to facilitate meaningful conversations and exchanges.
Using Materials

• How has the ‘loss’ of particular materials affected scientific practice, manufacturing, architectural design or development in the past?
• How have humans responded to the partial loss or decay of materials?
• How have ‘lost’ skills or knowledge affected the use of materials?
• How have humans re-appropriated or recycled seemingly damaged or obsolete materials?

Possessing Objects

• How have humans sought to maintain and mark the ownership of objects?
• How has the loss of possessions and property affected human mobility and constructions of identity?
• How have communities historically responded to the loss of particular objects? When and why have they sought to stave off the loss of things?
• Where, when and how have cultures of repair flourished?
• How has the loss of possessions and property (or the potential for loss) affected processes of production, consumption or financial stability?

Inhabiting Sites and Spaces

• When and why have particular sites or buildings been understood as destroyed or obsolete?
• How have past societies responded to the loss of particular sites?
• When and how have landscapes been actively purged of symbols and sites?
• How have past societies worked to rebuild or reclaim particular sites?
• What strategies did past societies develop to ensure the resilience of certain structures?

Please send proposals (250 words max per paper) for papers and panels to conference organizer Kate Smith (k.smith@bham.ac.uk) by Friday 14 October 2016. Papers should not exceed 20 minutes. Roundtable panels featuring 5-6 papers of 10 minutes each or other innovative formats are encouraged.
Thanks to Past & Present and the University of Birmingham for their generous support for the conference