How do we grapple with ‘placing’ beyond frameworks of cataclysm in industrial settings? What power dynamics might we unearth within liberal discourses of nature, even as we remain aware of the complicity of anthropogenic extraction? This panel analyzes ‘patchy’ zones of nature and capital in their messes and promises. In Baku’s oilfields and Ennore’s industrial ecologies, in Oregon’s experimental forests and Brazil’s sugar plantations, with plant phenologists in South Korea and Brazilian national publics around mosquitos, the presentations interrogate national imaginaries and narratives of ruin, nature, progress, and the future. By analyzing these timespaces of extraction and their human, chemical, vegetal and microbial politics, the presentations unsettle our normative environmental discourses and push us to imagine new vocabularies of placing in and through their human and more-than-human relations.

Keywords: Extraction, forests, mining, biofuels, oilfields, ethnography, health, science, knowledge, climate change, ecology, future.

Talks & Panelists:

• Rethinking Narrative Closures: Imagined Coastal Futures , Oviya Govindan (she/her), UC Irvine

• Drilling for a Theory Epistemic Extraction in the Oilfields of Baku. Zsuzsanna Dominika Ihar (she/her), University of Sydney

• What is an Old-Growth? History and Philosophy of Scientific Inquiry at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, Sara Khatib (she/her), University of Oregon

• Brazilian Sugarcane Extractability, and the New and Enduring Places of Sugar in Modern History, Katie Ulrich (she/her), Rice University

• Placing Climate Change: Plant Phenology, Field Sciences, and Semiotechnologies of Placing in South Korea, Sumin Myung (he/him), Johns Hopkins University

• Placing Mosquitoes in Brazil: A (Future) Ecology of History. Luísa Reis-Castro (she/her), Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Discussant: Dr. Sophie Chao, The University of Sydney
  Moderated by Pooja Nayak