Friday, June 6, 2008

CfP Rethinking Extractive Industry: Regulation, Dispossession, and Emerging Claims

This might be interesting for the environmental side of things, and it looks like a big, local conference.

2nd CALL FOR PAPERS

Rethinking Extractive Industry: Regulation, Dispossession, and Emerging Claims

March 5-7, 2009, York University, Toronto

The Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean (CERLAC),
together with the Extractive Industries Research Group (EIRG), both
located at York University, are hosting a conference entitled
“Rethinking Extractive Industry: Regulation, Dispossession, and Emerging Claims.” Taking place from March 5 to 7, 2009 as part of the University’s 50th anniversary and CERLAC’s 30th anniversary
celebrations, the conference will bring together cutting-edge research on the socio-ecological, spatial, and political-economic dimensions of industrial extraction. Through critical theoretical reflection and policy-relevant analysis, three tracks aim to advance our understanding of the social regulation of extractive industries in its broadest sense.

While we are open to a range of conceptualizations, we particularly
invite proposals to the following three tracks:

Track 1: The Political Economies and Ecologies of Extractive Regimes

The first track examines the political economy and ecology of the
contemporary global regime governing investment in extractive
industry—in particular, its financial, socio-economic,
spatial/geographic, and ecological-natural dimensions. Key questions include: How is it that particular national and global regimes of extraction have emerged around particular natural resources? What are the historical dimensions that shaped these regimes? And how do contemporary global financial flows influence the possibility of regulating their at once ecological and socio-economic contradictions? Possible panel themes include: Socio-environmental Histories of Extraction; The Political Economy of Resource Control; and Socio-Natures of Particular Natural Resources.

Track 2: Critical Explorations of Emerging Accountability Mechanisms

The second track seeks to map out developing notions of accountability in industrial extraction and their expressions in a variety of regional sites. Papers revolving around particular global/regional cases will identify key actors accountable for extraction and to whom they are accountable, who regulates and enforces these relationships, and which actors and interest groups are included or excluded from the process.
Many of these papers will focus on transnational accountability
mechanisms, their significance, and the particular challenges presented by these emerging forms of governance. Possible panel themes include: Formal Corporate-Community Agreements; Science, Environmental Assessment and Accountability; and Transnational Lawsuits.


Track 3: Global/Local Encounters: Civil Society, States and Corporations

The final track identifies how social response, including active
protest, has been central to shaping socio-environmental regulation and to restructuring industry-community relations. Here we seek to identify what forms of social mobilization have been most effective in improving the conditions of affected communities. We also wish to explore issues of representation and legitimacy in civil society organizations and the ethical and political dilemmas raised by transnational advocacy efforts. Key panelists will be invited from social movements and organizations, and will include representatives of Canadian First Nations, historically marginalized social groups in extractive sites, and NGOs involved in more critical advocacy work. Possible panel themes include: Critical and Comparative Studies of Indigenous/Community Consultation; Critical
and Comparative Studies of ‘Successful’ Social Movements; and Global
Networks for Corporate Accountability and Oversight.

Proposals should identify the track(s) most appropriate to your paper and include an abstract of up to 150 words. Please also name
authors/co-authors, institutional affiliations and contact addresses.

Please send proposals by post or email by June 30, 2008 to:
Organizing Committee
York University/CERLAC conference on extractive industry
240 York Lanes
4700 Keele St.
Toronto, ON M3J 1P3
Canada
eiconf@yorku.ca

Thursday, June 5, 2008

Notes from Congress '08

hey there from Vancouver;

the transcript to the keynote to Congress 2008 has been posted on the UBC site. the title is intriguing, tho' it strikes me as odd for someone for whom it does actually matter to ask and answer whether "universities really matter."

anyway, i look forward to reading the keynote (i've been horribly bad at attending, and selfish at taking a vacation); here it is (as a PDF file):

Stephen Toope: "Crossing Borders, Contesting Values: Do Universities Matter?"

Sunday, June 1, 2008

CCA presentation at Congress '08 - see you there!

Here's the abstract for my upcoming presentation at Canadian Communications Association conference @ Congress '08 in Vancouver. I'll be presenting on Friday morning, bright and early at 9am! Hitch a ride if you need to, but be sure to swing by!
Kris Erickson, Independent Scholar, Coordinator, Arts TA Development Program, Ryerson University
Between Two Worlds: Envisioning "Born into Brothels"

Born into Brothels (2004), a documentary film by photographer Zana Briski and filmmaker Ross Kauffman, occupies a unique place as a cultural object. Ostensibly the chronicle of a collaborative, intercultural, participatory photography or “photovoice” project with the children of sex-trade workers in Calcutta, Born into Brothels documents Briski’s encounters with her young students in and beyond the camera workshops she organizes for them. Yet more than simply a collaborative project, the film is also a journalistic account, a narrative authored at least as much by Briski and Kauffman as by the children whose images constitute the filmic space, and whose photographs punctuate the storyline. Since its release, the film’s supposedly neutral portrayal of these children and the products of their photographic education have been both celebrated and criticized, earning at once an Academy Award (as best documentary feature in 2005) and sharp criticism from social advocacy groups in Calcutta and in North America. This paper will analyze several images from the film in order to better understand how the products of contemporary visual communication like this documentary might successfully blur the boundaries between aesthetic representation and political agency. Because this film presents a rare glimpse into what teaching and learning looks like, it is an important text which highlights what I see as a pedagogical impulse underlying key discourses of contemporary media makers and media systems. In this paper I explore what the film attempts to teach us—about photography as well as about cultural practice—and consider what we might actually be learning from it in the end. As questions about the nature of truth and subjectivity, knowledge and information continue to be raised with respect to emerging communicational technologies and new media practices, a critical understanding of the increasing complexities of our visual worlds becomes crucially important.

Notes on Capra's Hidden Connections

Fritjof Capra's work rests on a common premise that, "To build a sustainable society for our children and future generations, we need to fundamentally redesign many of our technologies and social institutions so as to bridge the wide gap between human design and the ecologically sustainable systems of nature" (pp.98-99). This kind of broad statement raises a lot questions for me: how did current technologies and social institutions get built? who was included/excluded? who will be included/excluded from future attempts to redesign systems? how might 'our' understanding of "sustainable systems of nature" be spatially and temporaly particular? how do gender, race, class, age, and ethnicity factor into the way "sustainability" is framed?

My notes so far:

- The subtitlte is "Integrating the biological, cognitive, and social dimensions of life into a science of sustainability." This "science of sustainability" refers to the application of systems thinking to an understanding of life that connects "form, matter, process, and meaning" by means of one concept: the network.

- Goal: to build organizations that mirror life's adaptability, diversity, creativity. How would you know if these organizations were fundamentally different from existing ones?

- How to balance "community" with openness to the outside world?

- Questions of authenticity

- Companies need to foster communities of practices within their structures, but do communities of practice need companies (e.g. think of relationship between Arts TA and Ryerson)?

- Is it possible to communicate experiential knowledge? How does this "tacit knowledge" change when it becomes "a thing to be replicated, transferred, quantified, and traded" (116)? Think of Freire's discussion of agrotechnology.

- To what extent is Capra fundamentally transforming or reproducing global capital relations? A shift from computer time to biological time, from profit to sustainability (as guiding value), but how did profit become the guiding value and how will that change?

- Biotechnology can work when it "respects" nature. Who defines "nature"? pp. 201-202

- why do academics adopt positions not supported by existing research? (e.g. Carl Wieman's attack on the "lecutre" and Capra's attack on genetic determinism p. 205). The desire for community belonging can trump the will to dissent--this applies to graduate students too.

- ecoliteracy and ecodesign: www.ecoliteracy.org

- p. 239: system 1: nature; system 2: human community; system 3: circulation of scientific knowledge through the international community. Is this like Latour's discussion of the cave, and Science as the mediating language between human community and nature?

- Capra often refers to the reputation of his sources, sort of like a contrast between credible and non-credible people/communities?

- Overall, this book doesn't make me feel included, but rather more like a spectator to what is already going on (here are all the problems, but just sit back and relax cause it's all being taken care of). If the technical and conceptual realms are ready to go, where's the social? Is political will just a policy issue around tax incentives? what about public education around ecoliteracy? Democracy?

- In my Master's thesis I arrived at the conclusion that: 1) meanings of nature frame understandings of the form and function of urban greenspace; 2) meanings of nature are socially constructed over time and space; 3) at the Ecology Park in Peterborough, "good" human-nature relations mirrored "good" human-human relations, especially around ideas about diversity, health, community, and respect. How might these conclusions fit with Capra?