Frameworks for Speculation: Science, Economy, and the Uncertain Environment

Session Submission Type: Complete Panel

Abstract

ONLINE: Friday, March 29: 3:30PM–5:00PM EST

What is the relationship between science, economic knowledge, and the production of nature? So often, this relationship is explained by histories of incommensurability. Human mastery over the natural world is met by the finitude of human knowledge, revealing nature to be irruptive, indifferent to human life, and perhaps an agentive force on its own. This panel takes a slightly different tack in exploring the varied configurations of nature as both a value-producing substance and a contested object of scientific knowledge. Rather than a history prefigured by uncertain environments confronting human projects of systematization, we look instead at how uncertainty itself became part of the scientific and economic models used to grasp and transform natural processes. These built-in qualities of risk and variability were foundational to the imperial and extractive economies that fueled global developmental unevenness, and which turned geographies now referred to as the global south into storehouses for the cheapened natural resources, and human and non-human labor, that powered Euro-American industrialization. These global and imperial formations were predicated on speculative knowledge that took seriously the non-synchronous temporalities of capitalism and nature, as well as the limits of predictability in forecasting extractive profits amidst economic and ecological turbulence. These histories open a window onto our contemporary moment, defined most of all by the irreversible and non-deterministic variability of the climate crisis, in which planetary life is confronted by the dominance of capitalism’s speculative nature.

Our panel reconstructs histories of science, economy, and uncertain environments since the nineteenth century, spanning the infrastructural reconfiguration of oceanic space by deep sea ports, the concept of “extractivism” in Amazonia, the planetary knowledge of geophysical oil prospecting, and the scientific and political emergence of "global warming" amidst the "end of oil" in the 1980s.

Sub Unit

• ASEH Annual Conference

Individual Presentations

• “Without Regard to Season:” The Question of Extractivism in Modern Amazonia - Adrián Lerner, Churchill College, University of Cambridge

• Infrastructures of Ocean/Knowledge: The Port of Hambantota and Ocean University, Sri Lanka 2000-2020 - Tamara Fernando, Stony Brook University

• The Coal Evangelists - Leah Aronowsky, Columbia University

• Oil Finders: The Planet as a Hydrocarbon Reservoir - Matthew B. Shutzer, Duke University

Chair

• Matthew B. Shutzer, Duke University

Discussant

• Gökçe Günel, Rice University