This session is concerned with how nonhuman life circulates as a constitutive element of the economy. For over two decades, geographic scholarship has worked to bring nonhuman life and non-living materials in from the margins of thought. A simultaneous explosion of commercial research and investment in the life sciences suggests a parallel within the global economy, as ‘life itself’ has become a locus of capitalist accumulation. This has arguably resulted in the onset of a new political economic era in which economic relations increasingly intensify and proliferate biological capacities to create, innovate, and produce. Witnessed in a number of spheres – from harnessing living potentials as a speculative source of surplus value (Cooper 2011), to the capture and reconfiguration of nonhuman bodies as ‘lively capital’ (Haraway 2008) – these economic trends have had troubling effects on the self-evidence of economic categories and political economic organization.

Whilst there has been a long-standing geographical interest in charting the ecological and corporeal consequences of capitalism (cf. Smith 2010, Guthman 2011), their emphasis is often on dissecting the logics of capital rather than the innovative potentials of nature (Braun 2015). Only recently geographers have begun to rethink the scope and ambit of political ecology/economy, drawing upon both structural approaches and posthumanist thought to question staple political and economic categories (Johnson 2017), including labour (Barua 2017), commodities (Collard and Dempsey 2013), resource extraction (Labban 2014), and capital (Shukin 2009). What this work seeks to argue is that nature is not simply a recalcitrant or uncooperative force unsettling the logics of capital, but as a constitutive element forging the economic from the outset. Capital is indeed ‘lively’: both harnessing or troubled by the agentic potentials of the nonhuman, and drawing those potentials into its fold in ever-expanding rounds of enclosure and accumulation (Rajan 2012; Goldstein & Johnson 2015).

To this end, we are interested in papers that bring together recent work in geography and cognate disciplines to articulate the dynamics of ‘lively capital’ in ways that redefine our understandings of space, place, ecology, and even landscape. We are especially interested in picking apart (1) how the forces and materiality of nature makes a difference to capitalist logics; (2) the specific mode, rendition and production of value-generating life; (3) how these lively economies reinforce and rework categorical relations between human and nonhuman life.

Please send expressions of interest/abstracts (250 words max.) and a title by the 13th of February 2018 to: Elizabeth Johnson ([log in to unmask]) and Maan Barua ([log in to unmask])

References
Barua M. (2017) Nonhuman labour, encounter value, spectacular accumulation: the geographies of a lively commodity. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 42: 274-288.
Braun B. (2015) New Materialisms and Neoliberal Natures. Antipode 47: 1-14.
Collard R-C and Dempsey J. (2013) Life for sale? The politics of lively commodities. Environment and Planning A 45: 2682-2699.
Cooper ME. (2011) Life as surplus: Biotechnology and capitalism in the neoliberal era, Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Goldstein, J. and Johnson, ER. (2015) Biomimicry: New Natures, New Enclosures. Theory, Culture & Society 32: 61-81.
Guthman J. (2011) Bodies and Accumulation: Revisiting Labour in the 'Production of Nature'. New Political Economy 16: 233-238.
Haraway D. (2008) When species meet, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Johnson, ER (2017) At the Limits of Species Being: Sensing the Anthropocene. South Atlantic Quarterly116:275-292.
Labban, M. (2014) Deterritorializing Extraction: Bioaccumulation and the Planetary Mine.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 104 (3): 560–76.
Rajan KS. (2006) Biocapital: The constitution of postgenomic life, Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Rajan KS (ed). (2012) Lively Capital: Biotechnologies, Ethics, and Governance in Global Markets, Durham: Duke University Press.
Shukin N. (2009) Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Smith N. (2010) Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space, London: Verso.