Spaces and Imaginaries of Socialist Extractivism

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

While reckoning with the often troubling afterlives of state socialist extractive industries and networks, recent historical scholarship has highlighted the importance of spatial containment of labour, town planning and urbanism, welfare and housing provision, as well as environmental protection for establishing, maintaining or compensating extractive infrastructures in various state socialist countries (e.g. Kuromiya 1999, Grützmacher 2000, Blau and Rupnik 2017, Brown 2013, Crawford 2022, West 2020, Best 2013, Pál 2017, Lebow 2016, Spurný 2016, Smith 2015). Yet, the scholarly narratives of extractivism are still primarily defined through the analysis of the capitalist mode of accumulation, and we lack a comprehensive understanding of actors, scales and specificities of extractivism in state socialist regimes. Building upon this recent scholarship, the panel focuses on the spatial aspects of constructing, resisting and/or mitigating the effects of socialist extractivism. We are interested in various scales and objects of analysis. From mega transnational projects such as the Druzhba pipeline or mining towns from Most (Czech Republic) to Mardai (Mongolia), to micro-environments such as the domesticity of fly-in-fly-out workers of mineral and hydrocarbon industries, this panel is interested in exploring how space and materiality helped (re)shape or resist socialist extractive industries.

Sub Unit

• History: 1945-1990

Chair

• Katherine Zubovich, SUNY Buffalo

Papers

• Half-Life Spaces: Non-Permanent Urbanism of the Soviet-German Uranium Mining Corporation Wismut - Oxana Gourinovitch, ETH Zurich

• The 'Soviet Rockefeller' Learns from the American Oil Industry for Baku, 1925 - Christina Elizabeth Crawford, Emory U

• Acclimatizing Extractivism: Mobile Buildings and Rotational Urbanism in Western Siberia, 1970s-80s - Ksenia Litvinenko, Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space (Germany)

• Extractive Assistance: Copper Mining, Socialist Development, and Urban Planning in Cold-War Mongolia - Nikolay Erofeev, U of Kassel (Germany)

Discussant

• Kimberly Elman Zarecor, Iowa State U