Archives of the Planetary Mine: Culture, Nature Extraction, and Energy Across the Americas

Foto: Edward Burtynsky - Nickel Tailings #36, Sudbury, Ontario, 1996. Chromogenic print. Nevada Museum of Art. © rocor

With the turn towards extractivism and energy as objects for critical inquiry, minerals and fossil fuels have become crucial additions to categories of cultural, political, and materialist analyses. The international workshop Archives of the Planetary Mine will explore the intersections between culture, materiality, politics, energy consumption, and extractivism across the Americas, throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Its purpose is to address the geohistorical magnitudes of energy consumption and critical engagements with the logic of extraction as a condition of possibility for cultural production. The workshop will analyze and historicize the relations between culture and politics, extractivism, and energy from the outlook of material, textual, visual, and politico-economic case studies. It will adopt a cross-regional perspective of the Americas—i.e., North America, Latin America and the Caribbean—given its multifaceted role as a worldwide provider, consumer, and driver of nature and energy commodities. Even though the workshop will focus on this region, cultural and political responses to resource extraction and energy consumption stress how extra-human natures, minerals, and environmental concerns should be accounted for at a national, regional, and planetary scale. Resource extraction involves a global network of capitalist production, material exchange, and technologies connecting nations and materialities across time and space, something scholar Martín Arboleda has termed the “planetary mine.” By emphasizing this transnational aspect, Archives of the Planetary Mine will highlight the relevance of a cross-discussion on the Americas to understand the global apparatus of nature and energy commodification in connection with located and situated cultural production.

Confirmed Keynote Speakers

Martín Arboleda (Diego Portales University)

Assistant Professor at the School of Sociology, Universidad Diego Portales, Chile. His research explores the role that primary commodity production performs in the political economy of urbanization and of global capitalism. He is the author of Planetary Mine: Territories of Extraction Under Late Capitalism (Verso, 2020).

Paula Serafini (Queen Mary, University of London)

Lecturer in Creative and Cultural Industries at the School of Business and Management, Queen Mary University of London, United Kingdom. Her research explores the political ecology of cultural production and the cultural politics of extraction. She is the author of Creating Worlds Otherwise: Art, Collective Action and (Post)Extractivism (Vanderbilt UP, 2022).

Jeff Diamanti (University of Amsterdam)

Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands. His research investigates the political and media ecology of fossil fuels across the extractive and logistical spaces that connect remote territories. He is the author of Climate and Capital in the Age of Petroleum: Locating Terminal Landscapes (Bloomsbury, 2021).

Confirmed Keynote Speakers

Paula Serafini is Lecturer in Creative and Cultural Industries at the School of Business and Management, Queen Mary University of London, United Kingdom. Her research explores the political ecology of cultural production and the cultural politics of extraction. She is the author of Creating Worlds Otherwise: Art, Collective Action and (Post)Extractivism (Vanderbilt UP, 2022).

Martín Arboleda is Assistant Professor at the School of Sociology, Universidad Diego Portales, Chile. His research explores the role that primary commodity production performs in the political economy of urbanization and of global capitalism. He is the author of Planetary Mine: Territories of Extraction Under Late Capitalism (Verso, 2020).

Jeff Diamanti is Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands. His research investigates the political and media ecology of fossil fuels across the extractive and logistical spaces that connect remote territories. He is the author of Climate and Capital in the Age of Petroleum: Locating Terminal Landscapes (Bloomsbury, 2021).
 

Organizers: Gianfranco Selgas (University College London/NILAS, Stockholm University); Henrik Ernstson (KTH/The University of Manchester); Thaïs Machado Borges (NILAS, Stockholm University).

Supported by: Riksbankens jubileumsfond, supporting humanities and social science; and The Situated Ecologies Platform, art, design and research collaborations to contest and democratise ecologies with funds from KTH Dept of Environmental Science (aka SEED).

 

Contact: planetarymine@su.se