CFP Resource temporalities at ASA conference 2018

CfP for panel on “Resource temporalities” at the upcoming ASA Conference 2018, which will take place in Oxford (18-21 September 2018).

Note that all paper proposals must be submitted via the conference website which closes next week, on Friday 20 April 2018, but we would welcome early submissions.

Resource temporalities: anticipations, retentions and afterlives https://nomadit.co.uk/asa/asa2018/conferencesuite.php/panels/6769
Recent studies of natural resources have highlighted their processual, indeterminate and often speculative nature as the outcome of a variety of imaginative practices (e.g. cultural, techno-scientific, governmental, entrepreneurial, financial). Inherent to these practices are important temporal aspects which have remained remarkably underexplored in anthropology and cognate disciplines. This panel takes the existing cross-disciplinary literature on resources as a springboard to ask new questions about the multiple temporalities generated by processes of resource-making, which range from anticipations of resource matters, to their diverse retentions and affective presences, to other temporal and material states once processed or unmade as a resource. Current examples of resource-making projects specifically highlight their nonlinear, yet incremental and performative nature, including the “mortgaging” of hydrocarbon futures by emerging producer states; the constitution of “reclaimed” landscapes in the context of mine decommissioning and closure; the circulation 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 global resource frontiers, which produce various absences and presences across the domains of science, politics and market. Important questions are also raised by the parallel life of extractive waste products and by development projects that have been blocked or indefinitely postponed due to various techno-scientific or politico-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. 

All paper proposals should be submitted via the website above. Please email the session convenors if you have any further questions:
Dr Gisa Weszkalnys (LSE, Anthropology), [email protected]
Dr Kärg Kama (Birmingham/Oxford, Geography), [email protected]