8th Nordic Geographers Meeting, June 16-19, 2019, Trondheim, Norway
Since the 2007/8 financial crises, activists, academics, governments and international institutions have been discussing whether and how a new wave of land-grabbing has been
taking place (White et al. 2012). Responding to what has been called the ‘convergence of crises’ (finance, food, climate and energy) capital accumulation strategies have increasingly focused on gaining control of the use and benefits of coveted natural
resources (McMichael 2012). In the process, a diverse array of actors has in different ways become implicated spanning “businesses and NGOs, conservationists and mining industries, or ecotourism companies and the military” (Fairhead
et al. 2012: 239). Furthermore, host-states that facilitate the grabs are at the core of these processes too (Wolford
et al. 2013). In the context of increasing intersections and overlaps between different forms of resource grabs (land, water, green, ocean etc.) across time and space, it has furthermore been argued that there is a need for an approach that moves beyond
the focus on a single resource or a single case (Hunsberger et al. 2017). Geographies attentive to the spatiality of capitalism, that is how space is constitutive of and constituted by capitalism, without succumbing to an ‘impact model’ of socio-spatial
analysis, involving the surrender to the “inexorable logic of capital” (Hart 2004, 97) are well placed to interrogate these dynamics. Especially well placed, that is, when engaging in explicit dialogue with the rich and rigorous tradition of ‘critical agrarian
studies’ (Edelman & Wolford 2017). At such a conjunction, the very notion of taking rural transformations brought about by resource grabs as emanating ‘from above’ should be scrutinized empirically and conceptually. Rural people may themselves be active agents
in resource grabbing (Hall 2011; Li 2012), demanding geographers interested in the transformational capacities of capitalism to look much further to ‘a suite of logics, not only capital-logic’ (Mann 2013, 47). This panel aims to further such dialogue by bringing
together contributions focusing on such issues as:
Convenors: Mads Barbesgaard (Lund University), Jostein Jakobsen (SUM, University of Oslo), Kenneth Bo Nielsen (SUM, University of Oslo) & Mariel Støen (SUM, University of Oslo)
Please send
abstracts (max. 200 words) to: Mads Barbesgaard ([log in to unmask]) and Jostein Jakobsen ([log in to unmask])
– no later than 10th January.
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Mads Barbesgaard
PhD-Student
Lund University
(2018)
The Blue Fix: Unmasking the politics behind the promise of Blue Growth Issue Brief, TNI
(2018) Blue
growth: savior or ocean grabbing? Journal of Peasant Studies
(2016) Book
review - Tragedy of the commodity: oceans, fisheries and aquaculture Journal of Agrarian Change
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mads_Barbesgaard
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