CALL FOR PAPERS (2017)
Resisting and Reproducing Accumulation by Appropriation: The Capitalist State, Capitalist Natures, and the Alternatives
Paper session CFP for the Third annual conference of the World-Ecology Research Network: ‘Women, Nature, and Colonies’: Power, Reproduction, and Unpaid Work/Energy in the Capitalist World-Ecology.
Link to full conference CFP: https://worldecologynetwork.wordpress.com/world-ecology-2017-binghamton-usa/
21-22 July 2017, Binghamton University, Binghamton, NY
This session is organized around the urgent political need for both new conceptualizations and new empirical analyses of the specific ways that the state continues to appropriate Cheap Natures for capital, and how varied resistance movements to this process are taking shape. By addressing these questions in contemporary and historical perspectives, drawing on expertise from different disciplines (geography, sociology, history and anthropology, among others), we seek to better understand how the state and capitalism produce a historical nature and are produced through their metabolic relation with it, and how alternatives to this process are being formulated. Central to this task is an analysis of the capitalist state, which “appropriates nature for capital directly by force; during conquest, enclosure and the creation of functional property rights; and indirectly by its development of landscape and its infrastructure.” (Parenti, 2014).
This CFP focuses on the politics of accumulation by appropriation (Moore, 2015). This has two principal dimensions: 1) how the state has co-produced regimes of appropriating the unpaid work of human and extra-human natures; and 2) how social movements have resisted appropriations by states and capitals. We seek papers that address the (de)politicisation of property laws, infrastructure, nature, and unpaid labour; the co-production of different natures offered by social movements and political projects as an alternative to capitalism and its limits; and related topics.
Interested participants should send abstracts to Alejandro de Coss (J.De-Coss-Corzo@lse.ac.uk) by 15 February, 2017.
References
Moore, J. W. (2015). Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. New York: Verso Books.
Parenti, C. (2014). The Environment Making State: Territory, Nature, and Value. Antipode, 829-848.
World-Ecology Research Network 