Sedimentary Speculation: Valuing Dust, Mud, Sand, and Stone

Session Submission Type: Complete Panel

Abstract

This panel explores the social and political work involved in assigning value, ownership, and environmental responsibility to particulate geologic and earthen materials. Focusing on these materials once they become mobile – airborne, waterborne, or market-borne – papers collectively engage instances in which this granular matter accrues a new value or is re-valued when aggregated, and on the broader environmental context in which this has occurred. Drawing upon and contributing to recent work associated with the volumetric turn in political geography, as well as long-emerging trends in material history, papers will consider specific examples of the sale, manipulation, “improvement”, control, and appraisal of this often-unruly category of materials. The panel brings together insights from geography, landscape architecture, architecture, and historic preservation to situate these moments of sedimentary speculation. We begin with Desiree Valadares, who unpacks the extractivist and infrastructural ambitions animating the sale of Alaskan highway dust. Following this, Dalal Musaed Alsayer demonstrates how global developmentalist desires for affordable housing were linked to the hyper-local materiality of mud and mud-bricks. Erin Putalik then follows sand along the shoreline of Lake Michigan, tracing decades of effort in controlling and quantifying the impacts of its erosion and accumulation. Finally, Alicia Svenson explores the relationship between dimensional stone standardization and commercial value in the work of the USGS and the National Bureau of Standards between 1890 and 1940. From dust and mud, to sand and dimensional stone, the appropriation, extraction, dislocation, and accretion of sedimentary geologic material demonstrates a capacity to move land mass and matter into local and international trade and commercial networks. Through a series of situated engagements with these materials, this panel demonstrates how speculation and extraction operate on particulate and sedimentary geologic materials, bringing them in and out of diverse contexts of valuation and management.

Sub Unit

• ASEH Annual Conference

Individual Presentations

• Mud, Bricks, and Homes: Cinva-Ram and the Global Desire for Housing the “underdeveloped” world - Dalal Alsayer, College of Architecture, Kuwait University

• A Sand-Starved Shore - Erin Putalik, University of Virginia

• The United States Geological Survey and the Industrialization of Stone, 1890-1940 - Alicia Svenson, Northeastern University

• Dust for Sale: Infrastructural Residues and the Voluminous Geographies of the Alaska Highway - Desiree Valadares, University of British Columbia-Vancouver

Chair

• Hannah Conway, Duke University