CALL FOR PAPERS (2017)
Racializing Cheap Nature, Resisting Cheap Nature: Historical Natures and Capital Accumulation
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 paper session explores how racialization – in its entwined symbolic and material practices – works to re/produce Cheap Natures (Moore 2015). As such, it seeks empirical and conceptual investigations into how racialization, both ideas and practices, are temporally and geographically-bounded forms of historical nature. We are encouraging papers that question how specific forms of racialized natures, both contemporary and historical, are tied to particular cycles of accumulation (Arrighi 1994). What is the relation between racializing cultural practices and racializing technological practices? How is the cheap nature of racialization connected to the cheap nature of gendering? We further welcome papers that emphasize the key role played by the localized knowledge and practices in both enabling and disrupting the cheap nature regimes of capital. In what ways does the cheap nature of colonial-capital accumulation rest upon the appropriation and erasure of the deep place based knowledge and practice of indigenous peoples? How have indigenous peoples, migrant labour, etc, reshaped and/or resisted capital’s racializing society/nature distinction?
Interested participants should send abstracts to Joshua Eichen (eiche069@umn.edu) and
Bikrum Gill (bikrumsinghgill@gmail.com) by March 15, 2017.
References
Arrighi G (1994) The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times. London; New York: Verso.
Moore, J. W. (2015) Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. New York: Verso Books.
World-Ecology Research Network 