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

Abstract

In this session, we will make strange practices of containment. Questions of containment are particularly relevant today as people, animals, toxicants, natural disasters, ideologies, water, and land are enclosed within (or escape) walls, fences, nets, policies, rhetoric, and other ‘containers’. Yet containment as a hermetic closing off of a definite space does not seem suitable in a world that is as much characterized by indeterminacy, leakages, overflows, excesses, and movements. In this session, we draw on the work of poststructuralist geographers, feminist STS scholars, and Indigenous and queer theorists that have long since challenged a view of bodies and spaces as individual, closed off, and containable – notions that are often rooted in racist, sexist, colonial histories and objectives. Rather, we view ‘containment’ as the result of highly relational, situated and contingent sets of practices that are amenable to scrutiny and change. Rather than doing away with containment entirely, in this session, we seek case studies that rethink what it means to contain. In particular, we are soliciting papers that investigate:

• The role of technoscience and different enactments of containment;
• Concepts of ‘failure’ and ‘escape’ and containment temporalities;
• Externalities, and the relationship between containment, contamination, life and death;
• Refusal, justice, and ethical possibilities for containment.

In complicating containment, we seek to answer the question ‘what does it mean to do containment well?’. We aim to interrogate how different versions of containment always make possible particular spaces, trajectories, ways of living– ones that are not given but, crucially, might be done otherwise.

Chair

• Alex Zahara, Department of Geography, Memorial University

Individual Presentations

• Opening the Bin: Ontology of Waste Containment - Olli Pyyhtinen, Tampere University; Ville Savolainen, Tampere University

• Containment as the Material-Discursive Organization of Flows: Three Cases of Environmental Management in Canada - Ignace Schoot, Memorial University of Newfoundland; Caitlynn Beckett, Memorial University of Newfoundland; Alex Zahara, Department of Geography, Memorial University

• Containing Schistosomes: On Questing for Containment among Overspilling Bodies, Latrines and Lakes in Rural Uganda - Lucy Pickering, The University of Glasgow

Session Organizers

• Ignace Schoot, Memorial University of Newfoundland

• Caitlynn Beckett, Memorial University of Newfoundland

• Alex Zahara, Department of Geography, Memorial University