University of Exeter Press

Spatial Woundings

Entanglements of Minings, Metals, and Extraction

    • 260 Pages

    Minerals and metals underpin our everyday existence, woven into the creation of nearly all consumer products. Yet the extraction process of ripping them from the earth fuels often toxic global geopolitical relationships, colonization, and conflict. Despite their fundamental importance, these materials are too often unseen, unappreciated, and unnoticed. This lack of awareness occludes critical opportunities for researchers, educators, and students to engage with the complex relationships between people, products, and the environment.

    Spatial Woundings: Entanglements of Minings, Metals, and Extractions explores how extractivist logics continue to cultivate devastation, plunder, and ecological precarity, focusing on the concept of spatial wounding—the myriad ways landscapes and living systems are subjected to the violence of extraction. This damage is comprehensive, encompassing alterations to the physical landscape as well as injury inflicted upon people, animals, plants, and atmospheres.

    Featuring a collection of international scholars, this urgent book surveys the contours of these devastating outcomes alongside crucial efforts to resist the logics that perpetuate them, ultimately reimagining the role of metals and extraction in cultural, popular, and social contexts. The volume is structured in three sections: Part I details historical experiences and intimate stories of spatial wounding; Part II offers analytical engagements with mining as a metaphor in media and technology; and Part III considers the broader empires, extraction, and more-than-human damage, addressing colonial legacies and anticolonial ethics in resource governance.


    Introduction: Scratching the Surface: Underground Movements and Machinations of/with Spatial Wounding(s) Erin C. Adams and Bretton A. Varga
    DOI: 10.47788/QTSS9568
    1. Shifting Landscapes, Shifting Footprints: A Talk with Nalani Lemmerman and Robert Geary Nalani Lemmerman, Robert Geary, Bretton A. Varga, and Erin C. Adams
    DOI: 10.47788/WHWA6441
    2. Sunflowers and High Tease: Storying Older Women’s Activism Challenging Fossil Gas Extractivism in Eastern Australia Larraine Larri, Hilary Whitehouse, and Carol Bennett
    DOI: 10.47788/BZDS6471
    3. Trembling Earth: Storying Mining and Extraction in the Okefenokee Swamp Amy V. Gilbert
    DOI: 10.47788/GFGD9799
    4. Walking a Haunted Landscape: A Land Education/Land Art Reading of Mining Remains in Key Placer, Colorado Kate McCoy
    DOI: 10.47788/RJIZ8319
    5. Terror Incognita: Extractionism and the Eco-Horror of the Capitalocene Jason J. Wallin and Jennifer A. Sandlin
    DOI: 10.47788/IRUM3234
    6. More-Than-Human Reader, Text, and Stone in Samuel Beckett’s Ill Seen Ill Said Nilanjana Bhattacharya
    DOI: 10.47788/LRBU5139
    7. Orphanization Beyond the Human: Conceptualizing Extractive Dispossession from Abya Yala Barbara Galindo
    DOI: 10.47788/OPWX7882
    8. Enacting an Anticolonial Ethics of Reclamation Caitlynn Beckett
    DOI: 10.47788/YQPF9336
    9. Dialogical Gatherings on Mining and Extraction: Dialogues for Ecological Awareness María del Socorro Ocampo Castillo
    DOI: 10.47788/JDMA4454
    10. Extractive Rhetorics and Colonial Discourses on African Resource Governance Angela Z. Gapa and Cliff U. Kodero
    DOI: 10.47788/PYAO5606
    11. Circular Economies, Recycled Colonies Stephen Cornford
    DOI: 10.47788/AERL7017

    Afterword: Two Literary Exercises on Extraction Karen Pinkus
    DOI: 10.47788/ZVDE8299
    Conclusion: Lingering Residues Erin C. Adams and Bretton A. Varga
    DOI: 10.47788/CUGQ5469

    Erin C. Adams is Associate Professor of Elementary Social Studies Education at Kennesaw State University in Kennesaw, GA. A former middle grades teacher, Dr. Adams’ research investigates how economic education discourses produces economic subjectivities, how metals, mining and extraction and its associated discourses operate, and how post qualitative inquiries might increase our understanding of the world. Her research is published in both research and practitioner journals, and she is co-editor, with Dr. Varga, of the Theory Study Reader for Social Studies, Teachers College Press.

    Bretton A. Varga is Associate Professor of History-Social Science at California State University, Chico. His research and approach to meaning-making are shaped by a commitment to cultivate hope, imagination, speculation, care, love, and justice across more-than-human contexts. In particular, his scholarship works with(in) critical posthuman theories of temporality, materiality, and feeling to unveil harmful structures, logics, and practices that perpetuate racial injustice and ecological precarity.

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    ISBN
      DOI https://doi.org/10.47788/KSOQ2211
      • 260 Pages
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