Call for Papers, DOPE 2015: The production and circulation of value in, of, and through nature
Lexington, Kentucky, February 26-28, 2015
Organizers:
Patrick Bigger (University of Kentucky, Department of Geography)
Kelly Kay (Clark University, Graduate School of Geography)
Eric Nost (University of Wisconsin-Madison, Department of Geography)
Debates over the values and valuation of nature have recently returned to prominence in political ecology and cognate environmental social sciences (e.g. Robertson and Wainwright 2013). Renewed interest in the question of value is driven in large part by the widespread trend toward monetary valuation as the hegemonic strategy for environmental governance in the forms of payments for ecosystems services, climate markets, and the bundling of the well-being of nature, human and non-human, under the logics of ‘natural capital’. While political ecologists and their allies have produced compelling case studies on the idiosyncratic manifestations of value in markets designed to achieve environmental outcomes, this session seeks to build on this work to start developing a vocabulary for articulating the mechanisms by which value is created, circulated, and destroyed. Although the genesis of value has historically been located firmly in the realm of production, heterodox economic geographers (e.g. Christophers 2014), among others, have been reevaluating the conditions of value’s creation and realization with a particular emphasis on the circulation of immaterial goods. This rethink is happening in light of both pervasive financialization and the increasing popularity of cultural-economic or performative approaches to markets across a variety of political, institutional, and economic settings. Recognizing these new approaches to value and the rapid expansion of nature-as-asset-class, it is time to make sustained engagements with theorizations of value under capitalism. This project carries importance not only for those concerned with environmental-financial markets, but for critical scholars of capitalism more generally because of the window that financialization of the environment opens for interpreting the roles of state, capital, and society in generating value in its multifarious guises. To this end, we seek papers that contribute to debates on the value and valuation of nature that are empirically grounded but ultimately offer conceptualization of the topic more broadly.
Potential topics include, but are not limited to:
The relationship between production and circulation in natural capital
The role of human and non-human labor in producing value in, of, and through nature
The materialities of valuation practices and of market formation in natural capital
Entanglements of ‘real’ and ‘fictitious’ capital in PES/emissions markets
Conflicting valuation regimes, both within logics of capital and in confrontations among multivalent ontologies of value
Value-as-practice/Value-as-discourse/Value-as-semiotic
Value, novel financial products, and derivatives, including: insurance linked securities, catastrophe bonds, weather index insurance, green bonds, and any number of other specialized financial products predicated on the capitalist valuation of nature
The afterlife of value, including waste, externalities, recycling, and revaluation
The historical conditions underpinning particular modes for realizing value
Reconciliation of, and divergences between, marxist and performative approaches to value
STS, valuation studies, and ‘V’alue
If interested in contributing to the session, please send an abstract to both Patrick Bigger ([log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>) and Kelly Kay ([log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>) by Wednesday, November 12th. Participants will be notified by November 14th, and will need to register for the conference at [http://www.politicalecology.org<http://www.politicalecology.org/]www.politicalecology.org<http://www.politicalecology.org/> by Monday, November 17th.
Works Cited:
Christophers B 2014. From Marx to Market and Back Again: Performing the Economy. Geoforum 57: 12-20.
Robertson MM and J Wainwright 2013. The Value of Nature to the State. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 103:4, 890-905.
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Kelly Kay
Doctoral Candidate
Graduate School of Geography
Clark University, USA
Visiting Research Fellow in Geography
School of Environment, Education, and Development
University of Manchester, UK
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