EXTRACTION: MULTIPLE FRONTIERS OF POWER AND RESISTANCE
WELCOME
We are pleased to present our 2022 Central European University Sociology and Social Anthropology graduate conference this year in Vienna. We are honored to host our two keynote speakers Professor Sandro Mezzadra, and Professor Kaushik Sunder Rajan, and exciting presentations from the participants who broadly study themes of extraction, power, and resistance.
ABSTRACT
One of the most significant aspects of late capitalism is the constant proliferation of new frontiers that are getting subjected to extractive processes. Our graduate conference centers on the analytical aspects of extraction. We aim to explore the processes in which extraction becomes the foundation of global capitalism and how it blunders into dangerous, destructive forces. Extraction as a concept brings diverse frontiers together and opens the ways to inquire how contemporary forms of power and resistance have been enacted.
From fracking to plasma donation, financialized rental housing to big data analytics, processes of extraction are intimately related to pushing the frontiers of capital and valorizations of what is not yet commodified. Corporations, local governments, states, and the public are the usual and visible actors in furthering, managing or blocking extraction. However, this process also involves the very materials that are being subjects of extraction. Minerals, cells and tissues, apartments, data, forests, affect, and many other actants are imbricated in this process. Most importantly, extraction is often embedded with colonial, biopolitical, racial, and gendered geographies of late capitalism.
It is not a process passively endured, but it often generates resistance and dissent. Social movements arise against land and water grabbing which are intimately intertwined with climate and indigenous activism. Data extraction triggers concerns over privacy and data protection, as well as the erosion of the public sphere. These are just a few examples of the various forms of resistance springing up around the increasingly diverse modes of extraction.
SCHEDULE
June 3, 2022 - Day One
8:30-9:00 Registration
9.00-10.00 Keynote: Sandro Mezzadra
11.00-12.30 Panel 1: Mining, Labor, Finance.
12.30-14.30 Lunch break
14.30-16.00 Panel 2: Extraction Through Conservation.
17.00-18.30 Panel 3: (In)visible Extraction: Narratives, Imaginaries, and Knowledge
June 4, 2022 - Day Two
9.00-10.00 Keynote: Kaushik Sunder Rajan
11.00-12.30 Panel 4: Extracting the Urban.
12.30-14.30 Lunch break
14.30-16.00 Panel 5: Extraction and Management of the Population.
17.00-18.30 Panel 6: Statecraft
PROGRAM
DAY ONE - Friday, 3 June 2022
9.00-10.00 KEYNOTE: Sandro Mezzadra (University of Bologna)
11.00-12.30 MINING, LABOR, AND FINANCE
Organizer: Professor Johanna Markkula
Vasiliki Makrygianni (AUTH) and Konstantinos Petrakos (NTUA), Routes of Extractivism: Accumulation Processes and Resistance Practices in the Case of ‘Skouries’ Gold and Copper Mining Site in Northern Chalkidiki, Greece.
Gustav Kalm (Columbia University), Capitalizing on Competing Property Titles in the Simandou Iron Ore Reserves in Guinea: Investor-state Arbitration vs Host-stranger Relations.
Andrea Tollardo (Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca), Moving Ground.
12.30-14.30 Lunch break
14.30-16.00 EXTRACTION THROUGH CONSERVATION
Organizer: Professor Jean-Louis Fabiani
Alexander Dunlap (University of Oslo) and Mariana Riquito (University of Amsterdam), Enforcing ‘Green’ Extractivism: Social Warfare and the Making of the Critical Raw Material Frontier in Portugal.
Sonali Yadav (Jawaharlal Nehru University), Conservation Geographies of Extraction in 21st Century
Tilde Siglev (Central European University), Entangled Rationales of Extraction of Conservation: Reclassifying the Red Drum
17.00-18.30 (IN)VISIBLE EXTRACTION: NARRATIVES, IMAGINARIES AND KNOWLEDGE
Organizer: Professor Alex Kowalski
Susanna Gartler (University of Vienna), Moose and Minerals: Narratives and (Un)Extraction in the Yukon.
Federico Giovannini (University of Bologna), Moral Extractivism
Hannah Tubman (University of Edinburgh), A ‘New’ Frontier: Mining Afterlives and Futures in Kabwe, Zambia
DAY TWO - Saturday, 4 June 2022
9.00-10.00 Keynote: Kaushik Sunder Rajan (University of Chicago)
11.00-12.30 EXTRACTING THE URBAN
Organizer: Professor Claudio Sopranzetti
Tariq Rahman (University of California Irvine), On the Frontier of Capitalism and Islam: Extracting Land in Lahore’s Real Estate Market
William Jamieson (Think Deep Royal Holloway), Extracting the Granular Frontier: Planetary Urbanization and the Global Sand Crisis
Klara Nagy (Central European University), Body and Mind: Body Extraction as a New Frontier in the Food Delivery Sector in Hungary
12.30-14.30 Lunch break
14.30-16.00 EXTRACTION AND MANAGEMENT OF THE POPULATION
Organizer: Professor Prem Kumar Rajaram
Ines Silva, (Goldsmiths, University of London), Still/Steal the Plantation: Odemira and the Colonial Violence of Globalisation.
Ahmed Jemaa (Central European University), Border Regimes in Practice: Extraction, Externalization and Uneven Mobilities
Michael Kebede (Independent Scholar), Abolition Communism: the Spirit of Resistance to the Merchants who Manufacture, Surveil, and Sell our Souls
17.00-18.30 STATECRAFT
Organizer: Professor Daniel Monterescu
Elisabed Gedevanishvili (University of Oxford), Designing a Legitimate Dam: Resisting Georgia’s Namakhvani HPP
Saumya Pandey (University of Ghent, Belgium and Chr. Michelsen Institute, Norway), Licit sand economy: the science of extraction in the Himalayan rivers
Ariel Bernstein (University of Bologna), Afforestation, Zionism and the Transformation of Palestine.
For those who cannot participate in person, the conference will be live online as well:
https://ceu-edu.zoom.us/j/96912783943?pwd=bDM2bTg2R0Q4cHZMenFHbitYZVhidz09
Meeting ID: 969 1278 3943
Passcode: 232983