Resources, Infrastructures and the Anthropocene: global North-South dialogues

Beschrijving

Global resources and resource infrastructure play a significant role in modern societies; through a variety of ambivalent historical processes, they have come to entangle—and (re)produce tensions between and within—countries in the Global South and the Global North. In recent years discourses on geopolitical and domestic competition for natural resources have further intensified. So have associated concerns on resource security and circularity, socioecological vulnerabilities and inequalities, and a host of other issues. How could and should we (re)think and (re)write our global histories of resources and resource infrastructure in the age of the ‘Anthropocene’?
The workshop explores this question for two related topics:
• Resource Spaces in the Global South: Engineering Landscapes and Mindscapes;
• Globally Entangled Resource Chains and Socioecological Change: Sustainability and Global Justice in the Anthropocene.
In particular, we aim to mobilise research approaches and historical cases that help scrutinize/problematize these issues from Global South and South-North entanglement perspectives. The workshop will be based on a variety of empirical case studies, intellectual viewpoints, methodologies and literatures, and will focus on questions such as the following:
• Which assumptions, knowledges, and methodologies are used in the analysis of relations between the so called “Global North” and “Global South” regarding natural resources, infrastructures, and their environmental, social, economic and political implications? Which assumptions are shared, and which are not, when approaching our case studies? Do we have different notions and narratives about important keywords such as “progress”, “development”, “nature”, “human agency”, “sustainability”, resource “scarcity” and “security”?
• Which methodologies, research directions and questions are innovative, relevant and needed in current and future projects on the workshop topics? How can we encourage and help initiate and facilitate future research in these directions and questions? Which opportunities can we develop to increase productive cooperation of scholars in the Global South and Global North in research on global resources, infrastructures and their environmental, social and economic impacts?

Periode	18 sep. 2019 → 20 sep. 2019
Evenementstype	Workshop
Locatie	Lissabon, Portugal
Mate van erkenning	Internationaal