Nicholas Beuret, University of Essex
“After Extractivism”
Nauru is a phosphate island situated in Micronesia in the Central Pacific Ocean; remote in the vast ocean, it is the third smallest global state. It has and continues to occupy a crucial location within the porous webs of extraction and border zones. Exhaustively strip mined throughout the early to mid 1900s by British and Australian companies, Nauru’s economy was transformed in response to its geological exhaustion into a critical element in Australia’s hostile border zone. Dependent on foreign aid and a client state of Australia, it houses one of Australia’s brutal offshore detention facilities.
How is are the varied legacies of phosphate mining bound to the indefinite housing of migrants? What relationship between the surplus populations of Nauru and those social bodies that attempt to migrate to Australia, only to be caught in a web of off-shore detention and processing centres? Taking up both Nauruan and Australian responses to the question of how ‘exhausted’ ecologies are deployed to contain ‘surplus’ populations, we explore how such spaces function to transform (and reproduce) extractivist neo-colonial regimes. We contend that Nauru signals a move to reclaim the ecological devastation wrought by colonial, imperial and globalising regimes as means of managing the varied displacements produced through them. That is, exhausted spaces are used to manage the consequences of extractive industries.
Laura Castor, University of Tromsø
“Empathy as Resistance in Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms”
Linda Hogan, in her novel Solar Storms (1995) asks readers to question the endings anticipated in the Western extractivist narratives underlying the James Bay controversy that began in the Canadian province of Quebec in 1971. In a large sense, this ongoing conflict revolves around the consequences of allegedly “clean” hydropower technologies on Cree and other First Nations lands beginning in the 1940s.
My paper examines the ways in which Hogan uses empathy as a reading strategy for resistance, both to the construction of the dams narrated in the novel, and also to the ideologies that posit Euroamerican and Indigenous interests in dualistic opposition to one another. Empathy in Hogan’s novel is linked specifically to place as represented in several border zones. These borders are personal, geographical, cultural, and epistemological; her narrator expresses them through representations of vulnerable houses, bodies, and exterior landscapes.
Even though those living on Indigenous lands are most immediately vulnerable to the forces of extractivism, the harmful effects of these practices are planetary. For Hogan, the politicized events surrounding James Bay become a springboard for claiming the place of truths that underscore the need for all humans to support the survival of the planet.
Wilfrid Greaves, University of Victoria
“Protesting Insecurity: Securitization and Resistance to Environmental Change and Natural Resource Extraction”
As the circumpolar Arctic region has experienced increased interest in natural resource extraction – including oil, gas, and minerals – it has also become the site of acts of protest and resistance to many of these industrial projects. Across the region, civil society actors, including NGOs, activist groups, and Indigenous governments and organizations, have expressed their views that continued resource extraction poses serious threats to local environments, the global biosphere, human health and wellbeing, and Indigenous identities and cultural practices. Faced with continued support for natural resource extraction by state and sub-state Arctic governments, non-state actors opposed to these projects have increasingly employed a range of protest and resistance tactics to impede resource extraction activities.
This paper examines protests against natural resource extraction in the Arctic and sub-Arctic using the tools of securitization theory, which is an analytical approach that explains how security issues become socially constructed. Drawing on contributions to securitization theory that emphasize non-verbal and unwritten ways of expressing insecurity, it argues that protests are examples of physically performed, or ‘bodily enacted’, security claims that are undertaken by non-state actors when they are unable to have their spoken or written arguments about the threats of resource extraction and human-caused climate change accepted by the state or other powerful actors. In this respect, protests are not merely an expression of dissenting views within a society; they can also function as ways to identify security threats and sources of danger that states and other powerful actors refuse to acknowledge or effectively respond to. This argument is supported with evidence from three recent cases: the Greenpeace ‘Arctic 30’ protestors in Russia’s northern waters in 2013; the Gállok protests against new mines in northern Sweden, also in 2013; and ongoing protests against the proposed construction of new pipelines to the bitumen sands unconventional oil deposits in northern Alberta. This paper thus contributes to understanding different meanings of security and insecurity across the Arctic region, and to the strategic behaviour of non-state actors seeking to limit further damage to the natural environment and affected human communities.
Monica Hutton, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
“Consuming Change: Paradox of Culture and Climate”
Recent creative research that I have been undertaking while completing the Master of Science in Architecture Studies (SMArchS) program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has focused on the reciprocal and paradoxical relationship between cultures of consumption and environmental change. I have been interested in how consumption perpetuates change, and how this in turn sustains desires to consume new conditions. This research has developed within the Urbanism discipline at MIT and has followed the study of broader dialogues grappling with terms to define current global conditions and trajectories for the future. I have focused research on landscapes commonly discussed to be under threat and existing within varied states of vanishing. Sites that could be readily related to this include the Great Barrier Reef, the Florida Everglades, and the planet’s polar regions. In particular I have focused on changing conditions in Arctic regions and emerging industries of consumption permitted by reduced barriers to entry such as melting ice, shifting policies and advancements in technology. These conditions highlight the paradox that the same scientific findings that warn of detrimental consequences of ecological change are also used to construct business plans to access what was previously unattainable. From multiple perspectives, change is viewed as threat and opportunity.
One mode of consumption that is of particular interest is the border-crossing activity of tourism, and the increasingly discussed participation of humans in what has been described as “extinction” or “last- chance” tourisms. This activity operates within a limited window of time understood to bear witness to landscapes, species, or cultural heritage before they disappear. Aesthetic representations in the form of touristic constructs, and advertisements of cultural expression, function as a critical component in this type of consumption. Tourists are now the single largest human presence in many Arctic regions, the vast majority of which travel aboard marine transport, and the industry is an almost universal economic development goal. I am interested in the political dimension of such occupations that do not move along the same lines of efficiency, or with the same understanding of territorial borders as other industries do, especially in the Arctic where numbers far exceed the populations and infrastructure capacities of their host communities.
Much of my work questions how temporality is addressed through design. We seem to be increasingly aware of complex and simultaneous geological, ecological, and human temporalities, however considerations of deep time are often simplified by short-term plans that keep us occupied on present conditions. There are not extensive precedents of designing with future generations as a primary client, or for timeframes that extend far beyond our own personal lifetimes.
Laura Junka-Aikio, Tromsø University Museum
“Politics, Knowledge and Protest at the Finnish-Russian Borderlands: The Case of the Arctic Corridor”
In March 2018, Finland's Ministry of Transport and Communications announced plans to further the construction of a new railway route to the Arctic Ocean across eastern parts of Northern Finland, ending at Norway's Kirkenes. Together with the planned tunnel between Estonia and Finland, this new "Arctic Corridor" would provide a direct transportation route between Europe and Asia, and facilitate the export of natural resources in the high north. The reception of the plan has been highly controversial, however, and protests against the planned route are likely to emerge and intensify over the coming year. One of the communities that would be most affected by the railway are the Inari Sami and Skolt Sami, whose lands the route would cut through, and therefore Indigenous land rights are likely to become a central aspect of resistance. Having said that, criticisms of the project have entailed also very different voices and considerations, which appear to reflect deep splits within Finnish governmental policy and the formulation of the national agenda and identity. In this paper I intend to map the broad range of critical responses and the political discourses they take part in, and to examine the ways in which they relate to the politics of the production of knowledge and its role national and international policy making.
Rauna Kuokkanen, University of Lapland (Finland)
"The Arctic Resource Rush and the Political Economy of Indigenous Governance"
The development of resource potential has long shaped Indigenous-state relations. While impacts of resource development on Arctic Indigenous people, their communities and livelihoods have been extensively studied, the scope and nature of relationship between extractive industries and Indigenous governance remain an understudied area of research. Surveying existing literature, my paper offers a preliminary assessment of the intersection of Indigenous governance and the Arctic extractive industries, with a special focus on how Indigenous governance institutions position themselves and establish strategies vis-à-vis resource extraction.
Julia Leyda, NTNU Trondheim
"The Utopian Afrofuturist Extractivist Blockbuster: Marvel’s Black Panther"
The 2018 film Black Panther(Ryan Coogler) has made an indelible mark on global popular culture, to judge from the weeks immediately following its world premiere in February. The media responses, including blogs and articles about social media mentions, present an impressive array of arguments and interpretations related to African (American) representation, aesthetics, languages, music, and popular culture. The film has also received accolades for the detailed world-building on display in its fictional African location of Wakanda, a utopian black nation insulated from colonialism and slavery thanks to its extraction industry. The quasi-magical mineral, vibranium, which originated from a meteor crash in Wakandan territory, provides them with everything: energy, building material, weaponry, as well as an extremely valuable and tightly controlled export. The movie’s portrayal of Wakanda’s idealized extractivist society plays directly against what we already know from studies of the petroleum and mining industries in real countries in Africa and Latin America, for example. The seeming absence of corruption, poverty, and inequality suggests a utopian model for an extraction economy: one that places the shared security and prosperity of its citizens ahead of the elites who in other countries control resources to increase their own personal wealth without regard for the collective well-being. I am interested in the way in which Black Pantherpaints a picture of a harmonious Afrofuturist extractivist utopia. The historical near certainty that any developing nation in possession of valuable resources will fall prey to exploitation in one form or another informs Black Panther’s utopian vision—it is built in defiance of that knowledge, in resistance to that history, such that we are pushed to try to believe in the possibility of another world. This paper will interrogate the possibilities indicated by the film’s extractivist fantasy, as a staggeringly popular blockbuster that also serves as a utopian foray into an Afrofuturist alternative history.
Ruben Moi, University of Tromsø
“‘Nope’, ‘Extraordinary Rendition’ and ‘Loss of Separation’: Notes on Principal Humanist Concerns of Extractivism in Paul Muldoon’s Poetry”
‘It’s not just another leper who can walk backwards while conducting a tour / and making a case for Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus,’ the Hiberno-American poet Paul Muldoon suggests in his enigmatic poem ‘Nope’. Muldoon’s poetic reminder in 2010 of the American President’s suspension of individual rights in a time of national crisis, the Civil War, coincides with the dilemmas of human rights, national security, and extrajudicial transfer of individuals in the wake of 9/11. ‘Extraordinary Rendition’ and ‘Loss of Separation: A Companion’ are two of the poems in Muldoon’s Maggot that deal with two main concerns in extractivism: the costs and consequences for the individual caused by the amalgamation of ideology and profit-driven operations in the defence of the realm, and with the problematic concept of justice across the borders of individual rights, state law and universal imperative. Other poems in the volume engage with dilemmas of preservation and progress, and the artistic challenge of presenting incumbent matters of politics and justice in aesthetic form. This paper meditates upon how Muldoon’s poems engage with some principal challenges to extractivism.
Hania Musiol, NTNU Trondheim
“Cartographies, Elegies and Speculations: Narratives of Extraction, Toxicity, and the Future in the Nordic Global North”
The “Global North,” used commonly as a geopolitical category to denote the world’s most developed economies and/or former colonial powers, often seems inadequate to describe the Global South conditions existing within the Global North. The Nordic countries, and Norway specifically, occupy a particularly utopian and an exceptionalist designation (Loftsdóttir and Jensen) in environmentalist and human rights studies, as models for environmental sustainability and social justice. Paradoxically so, since the Nordic region has long depended on raw-materials extraction, providing timber, oil, other hydrocarbons, and metals to local and global economies, and is currently a site of complex, old, and emergent toxic practices of social segregation, and of extraction of cultural resources, information, as well as labor and humans (Berghtaller; Armiero).
To honor our location in the extractive north, this paper will focus on how mixmedia artists, curators, and activists in Greenland, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark address the dual cartographic designation of the Nordic region as a space located simultaneously in the Global North andSouth. Second, it will reflect on how the arts (literary, visual, oral, and digital) narrate site-specific extraction(s) of ephemeral, natural, and digital, and human resources and how they intervene in shaping narratives and knowledges about the Nordic region, now when artistic practice is officially recognized as a form of research in Scandinavia. Finally, drawing on the work of theorists of futurity and rights (Appadurai; Tsing et al.; Morten and Harney; Haraway; Alaimo; Powys Whyte) and my civic engagement with community activists, this paper will discuss local initiatives in Trondheim and Stavanger, the emergent silicon fjord and the tattering oil capitol of Norway. Not only did these collaboration critique the site-specific “toxic,” extractive, and “insolvent” present (Muñoz), they also enabled us to experimented with models of collective speculative storytelling in a challenge to the way toxic tech and finance usurp the future in the north and across the globe.
Alice Owen, University of Brighton
"Resistance is Fertile: Prefigurative Politics against Extractivism in Western Europe"
Around the world, unwanted and destructive projects are the frontlines of movements for radical climate justice. Here activists are not only directly obstructing the projects, but are also constructing other worlds that reimagine life beyond capitalism and extractivism. Through prefigurative politics, the occupation of the land is also an occupation of the dominant worldviews and ways of doing things, and communities are experimenting with ways of living at the intersection of environmentalisms, climate justice, anarchism, anti-capitalism and more. Three cases from Western Europe provide insights into alternative or Degrowth ways of organising: "Against an airport and its world", La Zad in rural France is an experiment in the commons; 'Grow Heathrow' is a small eco-squat near London opposing Heathrow's third runway; and, in the defence of Hambacher Forest from a coal mine in Germany, activists have built treehouses and a non-hierarchal community. These are symbolic and mobilising struggles, fundamentally bringing into question 'the system' and the way we relate to nature, and putting something worth fighting for in the way of something worth fighting against. The inhabited resistances are analysed as degrowth realities, and the ways in which these are politically organised and mobilised are explored. Located in sites of relative nature, these struggles also bring to light ways of dwelling in, defending with and relating to nature which challenge the popular portrayals of nature within representations of climate change.
Justin Parks, University of Tromsø
“The Politics of Extraction in Muriel Rukeyser’s Book of the Dead”
Written at the height of the Great Depression in the United States, Muriel Rukeyser’s 1936 long poem The Book of the Deadchronicles a devastating mining disaster that occurred in 1930 in rural Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, where, in the course of drilling a tunnel to divert the New River, the Union Carbide company discovered a vein of pure silica. In drilling with minimal industrial oversight or safety equipment using the labor of a largely migrant, largely African American work force, the company brought about what has come to be regarded as one of the worst industrial disasters in US history. Rukeyser’s poem documents the crisis that ensued through its splicing together of eyewitness testimonies, medical examinations, company stock reports, and poetic evocations of the West Virginia landscape, among other textual artifacts. In revisiting Rukeyser’s iconic poem, I intend to show how it condemns extractivist practices for their role in producing the space of the modern nation as an unevenly constituted geography of cores and peripheries, of modern metropolises built on concentrations of wealth and social power, supported by “zones of sacrifice” whose resources—mineral, vegetable, and human—are ripe for the taking. This paper will argue that Rukeyser’sBook of the Deadrepresents the various practices through which Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, has become a “sacrifice zone” whose primary value lies within what can be taken fromit. Finally, I argue, the “representational space” of Rukeyser’s poem works to reveal Gauley Bridge as a site where national and regional identities, environmental politics, corporate resource extraction, and economic crisis converge.
Anka Popp, Independent researcher (London)
“Enmeshed Images: The Cinema of the Rise and Fall of a Communist Economy”
Following a century of treading in emulation on the edge of Europe’s sprawling economic and military imperium, Eastern European countries engaged in the 20thcentury in a massive and alert transition from agrarian monarchical traditions to heavily industrialised workers’ republics. Several decades of sustained industrial exploitation of natural and human resources in the name of public accumulation and an equalitarian distribution of wealth ensued, ending in whole arrays of unbalanced low-efficiency economic sectors and deeply politicized social fractures.
Having thus reached the limits to socialist power, Eastern Europe felt yet again ripe for a dramatic leap into a new “zone”. Affirming their intent to reintegrate the ever more fluctuating confines of Western neoliberalism, Eastern European governments have since hurriedly carried out policies of large-scale industrial dismantlement and “shock therapy”- inspired privatisation. The “enormous labour force” – one of communism’s most pressing legacies – was handed over for massive shrinkage to private investors, following which a large part of them became “extractable” for the needs of different sectors of Western economies. Unsurprisingly, given its birth as an industrial cultural medium, cinema has been closely associated with the curve of these profound transformations in Eastern Europe. In my presentation I will be looking at a wealth of Romanian communist and post-communist fiction and documentary films portraying different aspects (economic, political, psychological etc) of industrial growth and restructuring.
I will suggest in my analysis that the cinematic image is able to efface temporal borders between the two historical periods - images from the communist period seem to already contain the seeds of future representations, whilst the post-communist cinema of decay and despair is undergirded by layers of former depictions of glory and élan– and is uniquely suited as such to reveal that resistance can and should be summoned beyond spatial-temporal configurations.
Andrei Rogatchevski, University of Tromsø
“Extractivism as Rebordering: Dmitrii Savochkin’s Mark Scheider(2009) and the Fragmentation of Post-Soviet Ukraine”
In 2009, five years before the annexation of Crimea and the outbreak of the Donbas war, a debut fantasy novel, Mark Scheider, by the psychologist Dmitrii Savochkin (b. 1978 in Kharkiv and educated and residing in Dnipro), came out in Moscow and St Petersburg. The book depicts Donbas miners’ secret plan to dig an underground tunnel from Donbas to Kyiv to dislodge the Ukrainian powers-that-be. The author describes the resulting imaginary chaos thus: “There will appear several large states on the Ukrainian territory: the Donetsk-Krivii Rig Republic with Dnipro as its capital, the Seaside Republic with Odesa as its capital, the Galicia Republic with Lviv as its capital, and the Republic of Crimea. Kyiv and Central Ukraine will form a People’s Republic. <…> Eventually all these lands will be to a certain extent swallowed by its neighbours” (chapter 29 of 30; the translation is mine).
Was the author privy to the underground developments that others missed? Or did someone very powerful read his novel, liked the vision and decided to try and implement it, at least in part? Either way, there is a direct link, in real life and in fiction, between the protests of Ukrainian miners and the attempted rebordering of post-Soviet Ukraine (see, for example, Limonov 2015). What is the exact nature of that link and does it have parallels elsewhere (e.g. in miners-related (self-) representations in other cultures), as well as wider implications for certain extractivist and bordering concepts and practices?
Methodologically, Mark Scheiderwill be examined as part of the so-called “commodity fiction” (Michael Niblett) – “about the world a specific fuel creates and maintains” (MacDonald 2013: 19) – broadly following in Ilya Kalinin’s footsteps (for his recent work on post-Soviet representations of oil, see Kalinin 2015). Representations of the mining space and broad geopolitical issues will be analysed on the basis of the so-called new spatial history, which stresses the subjectivity of space construction and posits that “the psychological processes of cognition and perception play a critical role in rendering space meaningful to the societies or groups that occupy it <…> <so that> real-existing features <of a place> often become imbued with highly emotive meanings and values which can strongly affect social attitudes and even behaviour” (Bassin et al, 2010: 8). Representations of miners will be examined in accordance with the so-called FASP approach (“fiction à substrat professionnel”, see e.g. Isani 2004), identifying various professional life narratives, such as the legal FASP, the medical FASP, the journalistic FASP, the police procedural FASP, etc. In FASP, it is a professional environment that shapes the characters and informs the plot.
Tiina Seppälä, University of Lapland (Finland)
"Women against Development-Induced Displacement: Postcolonial and Feminist Reflections on Neoliberalism and Extractivism in South Asia"
Every year, tens of millions of people across the world become displaced due to land grabbing caused by neoliberal development projects and various forms of extractivism. In many countries in the global South, the number of internally displaced people (IDPs) has increased dramatically during the past two decades. When less privileged groups and communities, such as peasants, urban poor, or indigenous people become displaced, they are usually not offered compensation or resettlement. For peasants, this means that after losing their lands and livelihoods, they are forced to move to metropolitan cities where they end up living in legal or illegal slums. As the value of urban land in metropolitan cities is continuously increasing, IDPs and urban poor are increasingly often evicted also from slums. Due to their marginalization and social exclusion from the society, the agency, political subjectivity, and knowledge of displaced people are often ignored in both academic research and policy-making. This concerns especially women, despite the fact that poor, low caste women have been very active in forming social movements that contest displacement, a phenomenon that has been referred to as ‘feminization of resistance’. In my paper, I focus on these aspects by bringing forward especially feminist activists’ views and perspectives in the context of their struggles against displacement and dispossession caused by neoliberal development and extractivism, with the aim of visibilizing their agency and centralizing their experiences. Empirically, the paper builds on my research with social movement activists in India, Nepal and Bangladesh (2011–2015) where women’s participation and political engagement has intensified in a broad spectrum of movements. Drawing on postcolonial and feminist literatures, I also discuss the interconnection between feminization of resistance and feminization of poverty as they both are related to the fact that neoliberal and extractive policies have had a devastating impact on women across the world.
Paula Serafini, University of Leicester
“Extractivism and human rights: generating public narratives through creative interventions”
Argentina is a country marked by the proliferation of extractive industries. From open-pit mining to fracking and monoculture agriculture, the country’s extractivist model has expanded since the mid-1990s. The expansion of extractivism has not only brought with it a series of health and environmental crises, but has also heightened the repression of protest and curtailing of rights across the country.
Resistance to extractivism is taking place in urban environments as well as at the sites of extraction themselves. Among the various forms of public protest emerging from this resistance, some of the most noteworthy have been embodied performances and creative interventions in public spaces. While addressing issues related to the extractivist model, these creative interventions have in several occasions highlighted human rights issues. Artists and activists draw on the discourses as well as aesthetic repertoires of a strong tradition of human rights activism that developed in response to Argentina’s military dictatorships, and that is deeply engrained in the social imaginary of the country.
This paper therefore examines contemporary examples of performance and creative interventions in Argentina that address extractivism through a human rights lens. It asks how the political tradition of human rights activism shape the way that creative resistance to extractivism is embodied and performed. The analysis situates these interventions in the current political climate, considering the ways in which human rights, indigenous land rights and environmental conflicts overlap. The narratives, processes and formal aspects of the works are analysed, framing them as interventions in the public sphere, and considering them in relation to the discourses and aesthetics of a recent history of human rights activism.
Pao-Hsiang Wang, National Taiwan University
“Irresistible Extractivism on the Barbarian Borders: Cultural Mining of Datong City in The Chinese Mayor”
If extracting natural resources is the a priori condition for economic exploitation, the case of Datong City in Shanxi Province of China seems to present an anomaly. In the wake of seeing its coal deposits depleted, and in the face of surplus industrial production plaguing China in general, the historic city Datong, the ancient capital of Northern Wei in the fifth century, situated on the borders of Bei Di or Northern Barbarians, launched in 2007 a monumental project, under the helm of the new Mayor Geng, to revitalize its sluggish economy by re-gentrifying the historic centre and turning it into a tourist attraction. His gargantuan vision displaced almost one third of its half a million population, and depleted its coffers in just five years, raising a host of questions and leaving a trail of debt when he was relieved of his post abruptly in 2013.
The paper will employ the award-winning documentary The Chinese Mayor (Datong, 2015) as a test case to illustrate and explore the implications and complications of excess extractivism, not only its economic impact and environmental effects, but also the possible adverse effects of adopting what appears at first sight the more advanced European or Anglo-American cultural industry model, by considering the documentary director Zhou’s unique perspective of “chaotic truth,” which resists demarcating the superior clear-eyed view of a documentarian by incorporating its bleary-eyed confusions, which serve to expose the double bind both the mayor and the city, or even China have found themselves in: where to draw the line between demolition and construction, depletion and production. I argue that by pondering the Greek myth of demolishing Khaos through truncating space and time to create progress, one can consider comparing the cosmology with Chinese emergent economic model of adjusting the dynamics of development and destruction.