AAG 2022 CFP

New Political Ecologies of Storage: Holding Matter and Value in Place in the 21st Century

Co-organizers: Sayd Randle (UC Berkeley) and Matthew Archer (Graduate Institute, Geneva)

Discussant: Daniel Banoub (Memorial University)

Storage is an increasingly important dimension of contemporary social, political, ecological, and economic relations. Although Marx observed in Volume 2 of Capital that storage nodes are deeply imbricated in the production and circulation of capitalist value, more recent configurations of storage that seek to mitigate or adapt to the impacts of global climate change are in the process of rapidly rearranging spatial politics at multiple scales. In a wide range of contexts, flows and environments will be shaped by the pursuit of large and small-scale storage for electricity sourced from renewable sources (Bakke, 2016), data storage (Jones et al. 2013), carbon sequestration (Collard & Dempsey, 2013), repositories for nuclear and other highly toxic wastes (Ialenti 2021), and stockpiled water (Randle, forthcoming), to name just a few examples. These efforts to hold matter in place reshape landscapes, spatial politics, and economic relations, raising important questions about the diverse values, times, and materialities of storage. This panel seeks papers that use empirically grounded, theoretically rich case studies to examine these connections, illuminating how storage arrangements are embedded in contemporary processes of capital accumulation and spatial production.

Storage is a future-oriented project. The production and maintenance of reserve materials is rooted in the anticipation of an often-undefined moment of need. Recent years have tightened the relationship between this generalized anticipatory mode and particular fears of disruptions to arrangements of circulation, with reserves and stockpiles figuring as buffers against systemic shocks that could halt the unimpeded flows of people, resources, and goods (Folkers, 2019). Well before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccine stockpiles were theorized as fixes for predicted crises of circulation that might arise in response to a highly communicable virus (Elbe, Roehmer-Mahler and Long, 2014). Yet recent work highlights the extent to which the perceived ‘need’ to circulate stored material is mediated by both its market valuation and the infrastructure and space available for holding that material in place (Simpson, 2018). Such findings suggest that the relationship between storage, circulation, value, and space should be approached as an open question rather than a settled matter.

With this in mind, we particularly welcome contributions that attend to the complex materiality and temporality of storage. Recent geographical work on the topic emphasizes the importance of attending to the more-than-human vitality of storage arrangements, as well as their complex, pluritemporal character (Banoub and Martin, 2020). The liveliness of stored material prefigures the infrastructures and practices necessary to hold it in place, often creating complex, resource-intensive configurations and surprising entanglements. Meanwhile, the passage of time can represent both a threat and an opportunity to matter held in reserve, where the risk of decay is offset by the possibility of a stockpile’s value appreciating dramatically. 

We are interested in developing a special issue on this theme, based on the papers presented at the conference. To facilitate this process, we will ask participants to submit short papers (2-3000 words) to the discussant and organizers in advance of the meeting. 

Please submit draft abstracts to Sayd Randle (sprandle@berkeley.edu) and Matthew Archer (matthew.archer@graduateinstitute.ch) by October 8. Decisions will be communicated by October 11. We anticipate that this will be a hybrid panel and welcome submissions from folks planning to participate virtually in the AAG meeting.

References

 Bakke G (2016) The grid: The fraying wires between Americans and our energy future. New York, London: Bloomsbury.

Banoub D and Martin S (2020) Storing value: The infrastructural ecologies of commodity storage. Environment and Planning D: Society And Space 38(6): 1101-1119.

Collard RC and Dempsey J (2013) Life for sale? The politics of lively commodities. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 45(11): 2682-2699.

Elbe S, Rohmer-Mahler A and Long C (2014) Securing circulation pharmaceutically: Antiviral stockpiling and pandemic preparedness in the European Union. Security Dialogue 45(5): 440-457.

Folkers A (2019) Freezing time, preparing for the future: The stockpile as a temporal matter of security. Security Dialogue 50(6): 493-511.

Ialenti, V (2021) Drum breach: Operational temporalities, error politics, and WIPP’s kitty litter nuclear waste accident. Social Studies of Science 51(3): 364-391.

Jones, Peter, Daphne Comfort, and David Hillier. The changing geography of data centres in the UK. Geography 98, no. 1 (2013): 18-23.

Randle, Sayd. Forthcoming Holding water for the city: Emergent geographies of storage and the urbanization of nature. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space

Simpson M (2018) The annihilation of time by space: Pluri-temporal strategies of capitalist circulation. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 2(1): 110-128.