Containment as the Material-Discursive Organization of Flows: Three Cases of Environmental Management in Canada

• In Event: Opening up Containment: Spaces, Trajectories, and Forms of Life - I

Abstract

This paper aims to contribute to STS scholarship on containment, space, and environments. We use materials collected through our respective research projects to learn more about what it means to contain and what kinds of spaces are created through containment, especially in the context of environmental management. Following STS-scholars and poststructural geographers writing on relational space, we start this paper from the proposition that containment is not about the creation of hermetically sealed off spaces. However, how should we then think of what containment practices do, what spaces, insides, and outsides they enact? To explore these questions, we take a look at different renderings of containment using three different Canadian case studies: salmonid aquaculture on the South Coast of Newfoundland, mine remediation in Northern Canada, and wildfire management in Northern Saskatchewan. Different renderings of containment emerge through the materials that each of us collected through participant observation at our respective field sites, interviews with practitioners involved in containment, and the analysis of relevant documents, such as government reports, newspaper articles, texts by industry and environmental NGOs, and archival materials. Through contrasting these different renderings, we focus on the multiple registers and modes in which containment is done, and what effects these renderings have in a world full of multiple flows, inequalities, and relations of power, capitalism and ongoing settler colonialism. We argue that it might be productive to think about containment in terms of the organization of flows that is both material and discursive.

Authors

• Ignace Schoot, Memorial University of Newfoundland

• Caitlynn Beckett, Memorial University of Newfoundland

• Alex Zahara, Department of Geography, Memorial University