Deadline: December 9, 2022
Contact: Jordan B Kinder, Harvard University
Email: jordankinder@fas.harvard.edu

Panel proposed at the 2023 ASLE + AESS Conference: “Reclaiming the Commons”

July 9-12, 2023 in Portland, Oregon

Sponsored by the Energy Humanities Interest Group 

As part of the ASLE Energy Humanities Interest Group, this two-panel series will explore the limits and possibilities of reclamation for the pursuit of more socially and ecologically just futures. The reclamation of extractive landscapes can take many forms. From discrete processes of rehabilitating boreal forests to soil remediation and wetland and stream restoration, reclamation as an umbrella concept most often involves returning a previously mined space to some semblance of its pre-mined state. But it can also involve dramatic revisioning of how land can be made useful. And in the context of fossil capital’s social and ecological destruction, reclamation of post-extractive landscapes performs important ideological work in reproducing extractive capitalist lifeworlds. In its capaciousness, however, reclamation also offers promise for futures beyond these extractive capitalist lifeworlds.

By examining the unstable and ambivalent characteristics of reclamation as a cultural form, this panel seeks to uncover the contested present and future of reclamation. This panel series seeks contributions from an array of disciplines that help to clarify reclamation’s limits and possibilities, which could include media studies, literary studies, critical geography, environmental history, landscape architecture, and architectural theory and history. Contributions might broach subjects related to but are not limited to:

– Meditations on the social and cultural dimensions of reclamation in public life

– Interrogations of reclamation projects as cultural objects and of existing reclamation practices

– Reflections on how reclamation might serve as infrastructures for post-extractive futures

– Examinations of the relationship between reclamation, land back, and ongoing settler colonialism

– Histories of reclamation practices and their institutions

– Speculative design projects that reimagine futures of extractive and/or petrocultural sites

– Archaeologies and genealogies of reclamation as a concept

– Reclamation as a (non-)commoning practice

Please send abstracts of 300 words and a short bio of 75 words to Jacob Goessling (jgoessli@cbu.edu) and Jordan B. Kinder (jordankinder@fas.harvard.edu) by December 9, 2022.

Posted on October 10, 2022