ANTHROPOCENE COMMONS: COPPER
Invitation | Mining Conversations. The Futurepasts of … Copper
April 29, 8-9.30pm (Central European Standard Time) (1-2:30 pm Central Time)
Dear all, please join us Tuesday at 1 pm Central/8 pm Central European Time on Zoom for an inaugural session of the Anthropocene Curriculum's Mining Conversations series devoted to "The Futurepasts of Copper"—each month will be devoted to a different resource. Honored to be invited to this dialogue alongside historian of science Gustave Lester and geographer/educator Victor Hugo Salinas Silva.
We warmly invite you to join the initial online session of Mining Conversations | The Futurepasts of … Copper. It will be the start of a monthly online series to critically reflect and discuss extraction and energy landscapes, across geographies and temporalities—up to this moment in which resource regimes, more than ever, shape economic, societal and environmental realities planetarily and locally in very unequal ways.
The series is hosted by the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology and the Anthropocene Commons network.
The series' first session will take place on April 29th, 1-2:30 pm (Central Time), 8-9.30pm (CEST). Please register via the button below.
The following speakers will initiate the session with their short inputs:
Gustave Lester, historian of science, Centre for Anthropocene History, KTH Stockholm
Victor Hugo Salinas Silva, geographer, educator, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Chile
Jennifer Scappettone, artist, translator and teacher, University of Chicago
Please find at this link the short concept for the series and the speakers' bios.
We are very much looking forward to our conversations to unfold.
Aleksandra Kaye, John Kim and Carlina Rossée
For more information about this conference please contact rossee@gea.mpg.de
Mining Conversations is a monthly online discussion series dedicated to how knowledge practices on local and planetary scales shape the energy landscapes we see today, whether influenced by past or present extraction practices. Each session connects different perspectives to better understand the social, material, technological, and environmental forces at play. The series seeks to provide the needed space for cross-practice, international and reflective conversations about mining among artists, academics, activists, and other persons interested in mining.
The series discerns the flows of matter, energies, and ecologies to unearth the roots of resource extraction and the ways in which it continues, more than ever, to shape today's economic, societal, and environmental landscapes. In 2008, Val Plumwood articulated shadow places as 'all those places that produce or are affected by the commodities you consume, places consumers don’t know about, don’t want to know about, and in a commodity regime don’t ever need to know about or take responsibility for.' These commodity regimes are often layered on top of existing social, economic, legal and environmental inequalities. In addressing the ongoing, unequal transitions of energy regimes, we want to think from and through these ‘shadow places’ of extraction.
Depending on the practices of the invited speakers, each session will be organised around a materiality, tracing different flows in which these ‘resources’ travel, at various temporal and spatial scales, from the geological deep time to the uncertain futures, from the micro to the macro level, and from the local to the planetary as part of global supply and production chains.
Mining is a techno-socio-ecological assemblage that requires transdisciplinary modes of reflection and critical analysis. The series wants to lay some ground for this by connecting researchers across sites and inviting them to think through alternative, speculative energy imaginaries and sol(id)arities, through place-based and ‘radical’ (as in Latin ‘rooted’) insurgent practices.
By bringing together the voices of historical, ethnographic, (geo-)scientific, and artistic researchers, activists and practitioners, we intend to weave together conversations across fields, reflecting and developing transdisciplinary methods of approaching and addressing questions such as the following:
How do the histories of mining industries shape the past, present and future of their human and non-human inhabitants?
How do we deal with the ubiquitous and persistent horizons of toxicity that extractivism brings about?
How can we collectively develop decolonial strategies for research and education across minescapes, in a time of global upscaling of extraction in the name of a ‘green’ transition?
The series will thus encourage reflection on mines and mining as metaphors for underground, hidden, deep, layered histories, as well as looking to the future and critically understand how green extraction fits on top of the existing histories, modes of extraction, lifeways and temporalities.
Each session will take 90 minutes and will begin with short prompts by the invited speakers, introduced by a chair. This sequence will be followed by a joint discussion involving everyone present. During the sessions, participants will be encouraged to digitally map traces of their experiences. The aim is to foster a safe and reflective space within the series where we can experiment with ideas and flourish a shared language and terminology for talking and thinking about mining and its various consequences.
We are committed to collectively coming up with a plan for continuing the conversation beyond 2025, such as nurturing the formation of a growing and open constellation of researchers connecting across minescapes and fields of practice, and other follow-up actions. In shaping new approaches to human interaction with the planetary flows, Mining Conversations thereby explores approaches to geoanthropology as an emergent research field of the Anthropocene.
The sessions will be around the past, contemporary and future situations of mining, including sessions on Copper, Lignite, Lithium, Forests, Copper, Petroleum, the Nuclear, as well as ‘Green Energies’ such as through Sun and Wind. Potential future focus topics beyond 2025 can include Gas, Groundwater, Iron, Coal, Gold, Silver, Nickel, or Cobalt etc.
The initial session, upcoming on April 29, 8pm (CEST), is focusing on Copper. Please register here. Speakers are:
Gustave Lester is an environmental historian and a historian of the earth and environmental sciences. He completed his doctoral program in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University and is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Centre for Anthropocene History at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. His research concerns the relationship between extractivism, geoscientific knowledge, and imperial political economies since the eighteenth century. In recent work, he examined the relationship between settler colonialism, geology, and the rise of mineral intensive industrial manufacturing in the nineteenth century United States, including how land expropriated from Anishinaabe nations in the Great Lakes Region of North America became one of the largest sources of copper for U.S. industrial capitalists. Gustave is now investigating the long history of “critical minerals” and empire in Anthropocene History.
Jennifer Scappettone works at the confluence of the literary, visual, and scholarly arts, and teaches in the faculties of English and Creative Writing, Romance Languages and Literatures, Comparative Literature, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and the Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization at the University of Chicago, where she founded the Environmental Humanities + Arts Lab (The City and its Others). She is the author of Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice (Columbia University Press, 2014) and of the forthcoming Poetry After Barbarism: The Invention of Motherless Tongues and Resistance to Fascism (Columbia University Press, 2025). Her poetry collections include From Dame Quickly (Litmus, 2009) and The Republic of Exit 43: Outtakes & Scores from an Archaeology and Pop-Up Opera of the Corporate Dump (Atelos, 2016); her words have been installed at venues ranging from 6018North in Chicago to the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art in New York City. Scappettone has collaborated with musicians, architects, and dancers to sound counter-histories of sites ranging from the tract of Trajan’s aqueduct beneath the Janiculum Hill to Michigan’s Quincy Copper Mine to Fresh Kills Landfill. Her current project devoted to the “copper lyre” subtending modern and contemporary communications networks, Pennies from Nether, was a finalist for the 2024 Creative Capital Award in Literature. Following a term as Visiting Professor at the Université Gustave Eiffel, she is currently curating a series of “floating workshops” devoted to the geopoetics of urban rivers comparing the fraught dynamic of water within the built environment in Paris with that of Chicago, the would-be “Paris on the Prairie.”
Victor Salinas-Silva is a professor at the Institute of Geography at PUCV, Chile. He is a researcher at the Center for Climate Action, and Director of PAR Explora Valparaíso. Victor has a degree as History and Geography teacher and has specialised in Geography, continuing his studies with an MSc in Environmental Studies from University College London and then a PhD in Geography from the UCL Institute of Education. His research focuses on the geographies of education, with an emphasis on rural communities in the context of climate change. His approach involves a triad of: 1) the territoriality as an epistemology of the South; 2) the social production of space, in particular, rural communities, as well as the living conditions of rural children; and 3) the management and spatial planning of education at the regional level.
Concept and facilitation:
The series is conceptualized and facilitated by Aleksandra Kaye, John Kim and Carlina Rossée, with initial conceptual contributions from Ramón M. Balcázar, Caroline Ektander, Sonja Hornung, Roopali Phadke, and Daniele Tognozzi. The series ‘Mining Conversations’ is hosted by the Anthropocene Commons network and Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology.
