Directions&Accommodation.docx.docx
Resources of Resistance: Production, Consumption, TransformationThe Postcolonial Studies Association Postgraduate ConferenceUniversity of York, 24-25 July 2014Conference ProgrammeOrganised by Hannah Boast, Rebekah Cumpsty, Lucy Potter, Nicola RobinsonThanksWe would like to thank the Postcolonial Studies Association and the Centre for Modern Studies, University of York, for their support and funding.Special thanks go to Claire Westall and Jason Edwards for intellectual support and encouragement and Helen Jacobs and Cathy Moore for their help in organising this conference.Travel and AccommodationLocationThe conference will take place in the Berrick Saul Building (BSB), located on York’s Heslington West campus. The building is fully accessible for disabled visitors, and visitors with mobility difficulties can drive or be dropped off at the door of the BSB.An interactive map of the campus is available on the University of York website.Travel DirectionsBy Bus The numbers 4 and 44 buses depart from the railway station at frequent intervals (usually no longer than every ten minutes). The journey time from the railway station to the university campus is around 20 minutes and a single ticket costs ?1.50. The timetables are available here and here. The closest bus stop to the BSB is the J.B. Morrell Library Stop on University Road. Cross the road under the bridge to reach Market Square, from where you will see signs to the conference venue.By Taxi A journey by taxi from the railway station to the University takes approximately 15 minutes and costs about ?8. There is a taxi rank just outside the station. Other taxi companies in York include Ebor Taxis (01904 641441), Fleetways Taxis (01904 645333) and 659 Taxis (01904 659659).By Car The easiest route to the University is to take the outer ring road (A64 on the south and east sides of the city, A1237 around the north and west) to the junction with the Hull/Bridlington roads (A1079/A166). Turn off at the exit marked University and follow the signs past Grimston Bar and down Field Lane to University Road. This route avoids the city centre and known traffic black spots. The nearest Park and Ride to the University is Grimston Bar, off the A1079, or limited pay-and-display parking is also available on campus. The closest car parks to the BSB are the Central and South lots. More information can be found here.Accommodation Given York’s popularity as a tourist destination during the summer, we recommend that you book your accommodation well in advance. Here are some suggested options. More can be found on rooms on campus are available for conference attendees, from ?24 p/n. Tel: 01904 328431 / Hostel Micklegate House, 88-90 Micklegate, York, YO1 6JX. From ?16 p/n.Tel: 01904627720 / Fort 1 Little Stonegate, York, YO1 8AX. From ?18 p/n. Tel: 01904 620 222 / International Youth Hostel (half a mile from the City Centre) Water End, Clifton, York YO30 6LP. From ?15 p/n.Tel: 01904653147 / Central Travelodge 90 Piccadilly, York YO1 9NX. From ?22 p/n.Tel: 08719846187 / HYPERLINK "" \h HYPERLINK "" \h Contact DetailsConference email: worldresources2014@ Hannah Boast: HYPERLINK "mailto:hannah.boast@york.ac.uk" hannah.boast@york.ac.ukLucy Potter: HYPERLINK "mailto:lep502@york.ac.uk" lep502@york.ac.ukRebekah Cumpsty: HYPERLINK "mailto:rllc501@york.ac.uk" rllc501@york.ac.ukNicola Robinson: HYPERLINK "mailto:nicola.robinson@york.ac.uk" nicola.robinson@york.ac.uk Twitter: you need to contact an organiser on the day, please call Hannah Boast on 07743399136. If unavailable, you can also call or text Lucy Potter on 07854572742.Programme24th July9:00 – 9.30FoyerRegistration and Coffee9:30 – 9.45The Treehouse (first floor)Welcome9:45 – 10:45Keynote Lecture: Dr. Sharae Deckard – Tea Barons and Coconut Kings: Sri Lanka, Commodity Frontiers, and the World-Ecology10:45 – 11:00 B/S/008 (ground floor)Coffee break11:00 – 12:00The TreehousePanel 1: Extraction, Exploitation and Exhaustion in Colonial and Postcolonial WorldsBen Holgate – “A war for money”: neocolonialism, environmental apocalypse, and Alexis Wright’s reassertion of Indigenous knowledge in AustraliaJay Parker – “The supreme importance of material interests” – ironising silver and territory in Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo12:00 – 1:00The TreehousePanel 2: Hydropolitical ResistanceSaira Fatima Dogar – Water “Matters”: Exploitation and Resistance in Uzma Aslam Khan’s TrespassingChristine Gilmore – Narrating a Nubian ‘Nile World’: Hydropolitics, Hegemony and Resistance in Yahya Mukhtar’s Jibāl al-Kohl (2001)1:00 – 2:00B/S/008Lunch2:00 – 3:00The TreehousePanel 3: The Consuming ImaginationBürge Abiral – Urban Permaculturists in Istanbul: Challenges and Strategies for ActionHugh Crosfield – Don’t Squeeze A South Africa Dry!: mobilizing the orange as anti-apartheid antiracist resistance (1972-1974)Priyasha Mukhopadhyay – An Uneven Modernity: Famine in the Colonial Imagination3:00 – 4:20The TreehousePanel 4: Flows of Resources, Flows of PowerHannah Boast – Pipelines: water infrastructure and the construction of Palestinian communities in Tawfik Abu Wael’s Atash (Thirst)Treasa De Loughry: Plasticide and Petro-ModernityAmber Murrey – Land, Place and Violence in ‘Narratives of Loss’ Along the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline4:20 – 4:45B/S/008Coffee break4:45 – 6.00The TreehouseKeynote Lecture: Professor Jennifer Wenzel – 'To Begin Everything All Over Again': Fanon, Resource Sovereignty, and Contrapuntal EnvironmentalismRespondent: David Attwell 6.00 – 7.00FoyerWine reception7:30Conference dinner25th July9:00 – 9:30FoyerRegistration and Coffee9:30 – 10:30The TreehouseKeynote Lecture: Dr. Anthony Carrigan – Compound Disaster, Uneven Recovery: Reading the Catastrophic Legacies of 1970–71 in Bangladesh10:30 – 10.45B/S/008Coffee break10.45 – 11.45The TreehousePanel 5: Appropriating ConservationAnnette LaRocco – The comprehensive hunting ban: conservation, resource-use, and contestation in postcolonial BotswanaSam Perks – Representing Homo Oeconomicus: Capitalist Relations in Planet Earth11:45 – 12:45The TreehousePanel 6: Human and Nonhuman SelvesFrances Hemsley – Human hides, Animal skins: Marechera and Zimbabwean Environmental PolicyMargot Young – Decolonising Subjectivity and Intolerable Bestial Others12.45 – 2.00Multiple locationsLunch, B/S/008Postcolonial Studies Association AGM, The Treehouse2.00 – 3.00 The TreehousePanel 7: Land, Environment and Resistance in Urban and Rural SpacesRebekah Cumpsty – Locating the Sacred in the City: Conceptual Mapping as Resistance in Johannesburg and New YorkPuneet Dhaliwal – Zapatista Autonomy: Land and Indigenous Resistance3.00 – 3.15B/S/008Coffee Break3.15 – 4:45The TreehousePanel 8: Aesthetics of Resistance and Resistant Reading PracticesKaren Jackson – Modes of Revealing and Rupturing the Rhetorical and Cognitive Routines of Consumer Culture in Larissa Lai and Rita Wong’s long poem sybil unrestRebecca Duncan – Visceral Fiction: Rerouting Affective Economies in Contemporary South African LiteratureDominic Davies – Infrastructural Reading: How to Critique Cross-national Capital in Colonial Literature4.45 – 5.00The TreehouseClosing RemarksKeynote LecturesDr. Sharae Deckard – Tea Barons and Coconut Kings: Sri Lanka, Commodity Frontiers, and the World-EcologySchool of English, University College DublinAccording to Jason Moore, the environmental history of colonies and postcolonies throughout the Global South is characterized by periodic reorganizations and phases of nature-society relations, which he terms “ecological regimes” and “ecological revolutions.’ Ecological regimes are the “relatively durable patterns of class structure, technological innovation and the development of productive forces…that have sustained and propelled successive phases of world accumulation.” Within the 50-75 year periodic cycles of commodity frontiers, when biophysical webs of life are exhausted and particular ecological regimes are no longer able to produce ever-greater ecological surpluses for capitalist cores, thus failing to maintain the conditions of profit accumulation, then ecological revolutions occur, characterized by the extension of exploitation to new geographies, the intensification of existing forms of extraction, and the production of new technologies and modes. Moore points to sugar plantation monocultures in the Caribbean as the most salient example of the extreme socio-ecological violence perpetrated by ecological revolutions and commodity extraction, but in Sri Lanka, socio-ecological relations are just as indelibly marked by the experience of the commodity regimes corresponding to rubber, coconut and tea, originating in colonial plantation but continuing into independence, and by the subsequent reorganizations of society-nature manifested during the civil war and its ongoing conflict over territory, labour and resources.Anglophone Sri Lankan literature is saturated by spatialised registrations of ecology on the “fractured island.” Gothic eco-topoi such as that of the spectral waluwe (plantation house) and estate garden, the threatening, almost eco-phobic fecundity of the jungle, and the toxic gothic of militarized waste-scapes, recur throughout the literature of writers such as Punyakante Wijenaike, Jean Arasanayagam, Ameena Hussein and Roma Tearne, mediating the history of the socio-ecological production of nature through plantation monocultures, paradise tourism and military territorialisation. These eco-tropes figure ecologies subjected to multiple reterritorializations, so that literary representations of landscapes become palimpsests of multiple socio-ecological histories and boom-bust cycles, saturated in accumulated violence. Reading through Moore’s world-ecology framework, this paper will explore how contemporary Sri Lankan writers represent the ecological regimes in irrealist aesthetics corresponding to plantation and to civil war: registering the collapse of coconut, rubber and tea commodity regimes; the desacralization, deforestation and toxification of jungle and dry zone ecologies through militarization; the slow violence of environmental refugeeism and stationary dispossession; and the complex restructuring of new regimes (such as mass aquaculture, gem and graphite mining, and tourism) through collaboration between multinational corporations and both state and guerrilla factions.Dr. Anthony Carrigan – Compound Disaster, Uneven Recovery: Reading the Catastrophic Legacies of 1970–71 in BangladeshDepartment of English, University of LeedsDespite contributing to the nation’s status as disaster icon, the events surrounding one of the twentieth century’s worst environmental catastrophes, the Bhola Cyclone, and the subsequent bloody liberation war have received sparse treatment from postcolonial researchers.In this presentation I will consider the socio-ecological and generic implications of reading across a number of reflective works produced in the last decade or so by writers and filmmakers such as Tahmima Anam, Manzu Islam, Sorayya Khan, and Tareque Masud. These depict 1970–71’s catastrophic events as being environmentally embedded yet operating across borders through diaspora, socio-cultural and bioregional affiliations, and multidirectional memory, and through globalised circuits of production and consumption.They also raise a series of critical questions that are at the heart of this conference’s interests: the status of East Pakistan/Bangladesh as ‘resource periphery’; the transformations and foreclosures that accompany mass resistance; tensions between independence and interdependence; contested relations between disaster mitigation, development, and vulnerability reduction; and the power of historical and aesthetic texts to help us think through long-term and deeply uneven processes of recovery.Professor Jennifer Wenzel – 'To Begin Everything All Over Again': Fanon, Resource Sovereignty, and Contrapuntal EnvironmentalismDepartments of English and Comparative Literature, and Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, at Columbia UniversityIn this talk, I reread Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth with an eye toward his analysis of the role of nature and natural resources in colonialism and anti-colonial national liberation, with particular attention to the concept of resource sovereignty as an important if under-analyzed aspect of postcolonial sovereignty. I propose contrapuntal environmentalism (modeled after Edward Said's "contrapuntal reading") as a methodological imperative for postcolonial ecocriticism as it enters its third wave. To be able to reckon with EuroAmerican environmentalist figures, and to understand their myriad, complex relations to the traditions constellated around the environmentalisms of the poor, without anxieties of influence or accusations of derivativeness or belatedness is crucial, I argue, for the future of postcolonial studies in an era of resource wars and climate change.AbstractsPanel 1: Extraction, Exploitation and Exhaustion in Colonial and Postcolonial WorldsBen Holgate – “A war for money”: neocolonialism, environmental apocalypse, and Alexis Wright’s reassertion of Indigenous knowledge in AustraliaPhD Candidate, Faculty of English, University of Oxfordbenjamin.holgate@wolfson.ox.ac.ukIndigenous Australian author Alexis Wright’s fiction critiques the environmental consequences of neocolonialism and global capitalism. This is set against the Indigenous Australian Dreamtime, a complex philosophy that incorporates ecology and an inextricable connection with the land but which has been marginalised along with Aboriginal Australians since British colonisation in the eighteenth century. This paper explores Wright’s use of magical realism to depict the clash of oppositional systems, as critic Stephen Slemon identified typically occurs in the narrative mode, that are locked in a continuous dialectic with one another, creating gaps in knowledge. Wright develops magical realism in new directions by drawing on both Indigenous and non-Indigenous mythology, in order to reinstate the marginalised autochthon and present an alternative world view to capitalist materialism. Moreover, Wright’s fiction emanates from the perspective of a “fourth-world,” using Robert Young’s definition of colonised first inhabitants in an officially decolonised country. This paper discusses these themes in regards to two of Wright’s novels. The Swan Book (2013) is an allegory that portrays an environmental post-apocalypse in the near future in Australia. Global warming has displaced millions of people worldwide, causing environmental refugees to flee to Australia even though the country has been ravaged by extreme drought and torrential rains. Carpentaria (2006) dramatises a contemporary war by Aboriginal guerrilla activists fighting against the colluding neocolonial powers of politicians and a multinational mining company that ride roughshod over Indigenous land rights.Jay Parker – “The supreme importance of material interests” – ironising silver and territory in Joseph Conrad’s NostromoPhD Candidate, School of English, University of Leedsmail@jay-parker.co.ukSilver looms large in the history of capitalism. It is also the central image of Joseph Conrad’s great deconstruction of liberalism and capitalism, Nostromo (1904), which casts silver ironically as both the saviour and corruptor of the novel’s nascent fictional nation of Costaguana. The potential for this text to interrogate these systems is well established, and interdisciplinary work such as Houseman and Johnson’s examination of the political, metallurgical, and literary dimensions of silver in relation to Conrad’s novel (1991) make a strong case for these connections. This paper extends this work to engage with this novel’s awareness of the interdependence of environmental factors, such as terrain, and social factors, such as class and ethnicity. Conrad displays a remarkable prescience in his fiction, which enables it to be read productively into a postcolonial context. Nostromo particularly examines how the colonial South American setting of the novel interrogates a complex geo-political relationship between colonies and home, where ideological and territorial proximities and distances interact to problematize binaries of nature and society. A reading of how Nostromo negotiates and traverses these boundaries will be used to engage with the notion of ‘capitalism as world-ecology’ (Moore, 2011), suggesting that in the complex interdependencies of the socio-ecological, there are important social dynamics alongside capitalism which mediate the production of society and nature.Panel 2: Hydropolitical ResistanceSaira Fatima Dogar – Water “Matters”: Exploitation and Resistance in Uzma Aslam Khan’s TrespassingPhD Candidate, School of English, University of Leedsensfd@leeds.ac.ukMy paper focuses on water’s simultaneous portrayal as a material resource of exploitation and resistance in Uzma Aslam Khan’s 2004 novel Trespassing. Reading the presence of foreign trawlers in Karachi’s seas at the beginning of the novel as an instance of “geographical expansion” as conceived by Jason Moore (2012), and the grave consequences of this exploitative “trespassing” on the lives of displaced local fishermen communities, I will show how water also inspires creative modes of resistance in the form of truck art and silkworm breeding. Exploring the genesis of the Sindh separatist struggle and the ethnic riots that have been wreaking havoc in Karachi for over two decades, Khan relates the phenomena directly to the unequal distribution of water between the provinces of Pakistan. Water is also, however, seen as an element calling attention to the need to belong to the land rather than having the land belong to any one ethnic community. One way of forging this sense of belonging with the land is evidenced in the fostering of human- animal bonds between the protagonist figure and marine life at the start of the novel, and those between silk worms and the women responsible for raising and tending them locally in the Thatta region of Sind. From water’s divisive role in inciting separatist ethnic orientations to its fostering of deeper human and animal connections, and the role of the sea space as an impetus to aesthetic and poetic transformation of city space, the novel opens itself up to provocative readings in the domain of hydropolitics, ecocriticism and human geography. My paper will offer an analysis of Khan’s evocation of water’s dual potentialities as a resource of exploitation and resistance in the context of Pakistan’s current political crisis.Christine Gilmore – Narrating a Nubian ‘Nile World’: Hydropolitics, Hegemony and Resistance in Yahya Mukhtar’s Jibāl al-Kohl (2001)PhD Candidate, School of English, University of Leedschris8tine80@As Terje Tvedt has observed "The River Nile serves as an example by which to explore various uses and meanings of water: how rivers have influenced policy and how they in turn have been shaped by politics; how concepts of nature develop, and how these concepts or particular social constructions of nature can have impacts on both river development and politics." (The River Nile in the Age of the British: Political Ecology and the Quest For Economic Power (London: IB Taurus, 2004, p.3). During the age of British colonialism in Egypt a hegemonic Nile discourse emerged that conceived of the river as little more than a 'drainage ditch' to feed the irrigation economy of the north and facilitate industrial development and paid scant attention to the perspectives and priorities of the 'people in the way'. This utilitarian approach to Nile waters continued to influence hydrological developments into the postcolonial era, notably construction of the Aswan High Dam which flooded all of ancient Nubia and displaced its' inhabitants in the name of national(ist) development priorities. Whereas Nubian perspectives towards the Nile and its development have remained marginalised in Egyptian official discourse, this paper will re-centre our attention onto the marginalised Nubian 'Nile World' which attaches alternative meanings and value to the river and its resources. Through analysis of Muhammad Khalil Qasim's novel Ash-Shamandoura (The River Gauge, 1968) I will examine how changes to the Nubian 'Nile World' which accompany the raising of the Aswan Barrage in 1933 are represented within the text and how Nubian strategies of resistance to the raising of the Aswan Barrage in 1933 contribute to the critique of the inequities of modernist hydrological development in the Nile Basin.Panel 3: The Consuming ImaginationBürge Abiral – Urban Permaculturists in Istanbul: Challenges and Strategies for ActionMA Student, Sabanc? University, Istanbul, Turkeyburgeabiral@sabanciuniv.eduIntroduced as a science of ethical design in the 1970s by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, permaculture aims to provide an alternative integrated system of livelihood which cares for all beings. Even though it is concerned with ethical and eco-friendly design, use, and distribution of resources, Mollison’s description of the system places permaculture outside the political field. In other words, concerned with personal and local responses for change, permaculture is not launched as a political project. In my thesis research, I’m interested in the denial of the political by permaculturists and in the ramifications of this denial. More specifically, I’m exploring how this post-ideological language finds its niche within the specific context of Turkey, especially after the Gezi uprisings when more and more people have been showing interest in permaculture. For this specific paper, I will draw from my current fieldwork with permaculturists who live in metropolitan Istanbul and, always cognizant of the question of the political, focus on the challenges of practicing and organizing around permaculture in an urban setting. The loose structure of permaculture enables a diversity of approaches and allows for a wide range of participation; ecovillages, community gardens, and personal initiatives such as growing herbs in the balcony, can all be seen as equally creating alternatives to capitalism. Yet this flexibility runs the danger of incorporation into the capitalist economy. Bearing this in mind, I ask how urban permaculturists integrate the ethical principles put forth by permaculture into their daily lives. What practices and discourses develop, sustain, and change their “ecological habitus” in the city (Haluza-DeLay 2008)? Are their lifestyle choices simply a cooptation of dissent by neoliberal ideology? Or are they strategic actions for change while urban permaculturists navigate the ethical contradiction of envisioning a new world and functioning within the paradigm of capitalism?Hugh Crosfield – Don’t Squeeze A South Africa Dry!: mobilizing the orange as anti-apartheid antiracist resistance (1972-1974)Hugh.Crosfield.2009@live.rhul.ac.ukIn this paper I focus on the Dutch anti-apartheid and antiracist organization, Boycott Outspan Action (BOA) and their boycott of apartheid citrus. Based in Leiden, Holland, the organization were unique among five very different Dutch anti-apartheid organizations of the 1970s and 80s in interpreting apartheid as the hard edge of European racism. The BOA encouraged Dutch public, corporations and government to withdraw from complicity with the "bouwstenen voor apartheid" (building blocks for apartheid), and to "see themselves whitely" (Hooker, 2009:6). Chiming with Jason Moore's (2003) 'four cheaps' of capitalism's unsustainable world ecology, the building blocks for South African apartheid, they argued, were international trade and migration, South African-Dutch/British cultural ties, and the procuring of cheap land and labour.Drawing from interview data with activists and archival research, the paper traces the redeployment of somatic markers of famine from media reports of the South African resettlement areas, to the front-line of the BOA's Outspan boycott. The BOA positioned Outspan oranges as ubiquitous and tangible building blocks for apartheid and initiated a nationwide boycott of the South African citrus exporter in 1973. Expanding on Timothy Morton's (2000) writing on the blood-sugar topos (as the 'guilt trope' of eighteenth century British antislavery), the paper forwards my concept of activist bodywork to demonstrate the utility of Outspan oranges to anti-apartheid. By performing activist bodywork the BOA harnessed specific emotions and mobilized the orange's socio-material properties and histories to parody the 'blood-ties' between apartheid South Africa and Holland. The expansion of white frontier colonialism and citrus capitalism were indelibly linked by the organization. As the BOA's remarkable 'Inspan Girls' demonstrated, familiar borders between South Africa and Holland, black and white, oppressed and liberator, were made to seem uncomfortably fragile by the BOA and their philosophy 'racism here apartheid there'. Priyasha Mukhopadhyay – An Uneven Modernity: Famine in the Colonial ImaginationDPhil Candidate, Faculty of English, University of Oxfordpriyasha.mukhopadhyay@wolfson.ox.ac.ukThe focus of this paper is Harriet Tytler’s An Englishwoman in India and J E Scott’s In Famine Land, both of which discuss the experience of famine in late colonial India. While the nineteenth century was the first period in English history untainted by domestic famines, the threat of hunger continued to be a haunting presence in the Victorian imagination. This was largely because of the alarming number of famines in India at the time, leading to several million deaths in a 130-year period. With economic policy and grain distribution patterns implying that “Londoners were in effect eating India’s bread” (Davis 26), modernity at home thus came at the cost of modernity abroad, India England’s ”[u]tilitarian laboratory” (Davis 31).In this paper, I am particularly interested in the manner in which questions of food and consumption economy are quickly replaced by the need to create an alternative spiritual economy, drawing on the altruistic bent of the colonial ideological project. I will demonstrate how the narratives my paper will deal with use famine and starvation as a means of rethinking subject-formation, suggesting that the act of both experiencing as well as witnessing hunger, particularly the hunger of others, becomes a central part in the consolidation of often unstable, errant colonialist identities. This, I will argue, is partly fuelled by the manipulation of narrative form – the new documentary genres of the autobiography, report, photograph and realist short story – that enables vicarious witnessing for readers at home. Alongside these texts, I will examine two tracts written by Indians that address the question of famine, RC Dutt’s Open Letters to Lord Curzon on Famines and Land Assessments in India (1900) and Dadabhai Naoroji’s Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (1901), arguing that their alternative deployment of statistical methods and rhetoric stands as the beginnings of anti-colonial material practices in India.The paper will thus be a reminder that perceptions of progress are ultimately dependent on the indefinite production of otherness that must persist for colonialism to sustain itself. The starving Indian at the periphery of the world becomes then, both the victim and the impetus for resistance.Panel 4: Flows of Resources, Flows of PowerHannah Boast – Pipelines: water infrastructure and the construction of Palestinian communities in Tawfik Abu Wael’s Atash (Thirst)PhD Candidate, Department of English and Related Literature, University of Yorkhannah.boast@york.ac.ukOver the last twenty years, the right to water has become increasingly cited as a major contributing factor to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, as well as a key aspect of any potential resolution (Allan 2002; Zeitoun 2011). Much scholarship and political speculation has centred on the idea of “water wars” (Starr 1988; Shiva 2002). This focus on water conflict within Israeli and Palestinian politics follows a shift in popular and academic political discourse more generally, the two mantras of which have become the claim that “water has become as important a commodity as oil”, and the 1995 statement of former World Bank Vice-President Ismail Serageldin that “many of the wars of this century were about oil…wars of the next century will be over water” (in Selby, 2003).In this paper I engage with the discourse of “water wars” through exploring Arab Israeli director Tawfik Abu Wael’s film Atash (2004), arguing that the film demonstrates the ways in which control of water has become an Israeli means of exercising a form of biopolitical control over Palestinian society and a way of restricting Palestinian economic development (Alatout 2006; 2008). At the same time, I show that Wael’s film illustrates the inadequacies of discussing water conflict in terms of grand geopolitical scales. In contrast, I argue with Selby (2003) that water conflict is more likely to manifest in terms of low-level conflict between local communities, and control of water supplies can, as in the patriarchal family depicted in Atash, become a means of reinforcing structures of social power within Palestinian society. Finally, I argue that the film illustrates an important point about water conflict which is often absent from debates, which is that the right to water is worthless without the political and financial means to put in place a system of water infrastructure. This shows that, as a number of critical geographers have highlighted, water is a resource which undermines the separation of the “human” and the “natural” (Kaika 2005; Linton 201; Swyngedouw 2004).Treasa De Loughry: Plasticide and Petro-ModernityPhD Candidate, UCD's Humanities Institute and School of English, University College Dublintreasa.de-loughry@ucdconnect.ieThis paper examines plastic as an index of petro-modernity despite its strangely distant relationship from its origins in crude oil. As Barry Commoner notes in The Closing Circle, by its own internal logic each new petrochemical process generates a powerful tendency to proliferate products and displace pre-existing ones. While oil is embedded in our energy intensive culture and is described as the “ur-commodity,” we have accultured energy’s role in determining material and social life, in part due to the immediately alienating affects of dispersed petro-cultures (Graeme MacDonald, 2013). The profusion of derivate products, like plastic, operates at a remove from such energy ontologies and how we think about the production, use and disuse of global plastic commodities relies on geographic and temporal displacements and appeals to consumerism and individual ethical choices. Yet petro-modernity is at the heart of neoliberalism and what Jason Moore calls the frontier-led appropriations of cheap nature and unpaid work which are central to the strategic expansions of commodity capitalism.In this paper, I firstly examine plastic as toxic waste or “plasticide”: as documented by Chris Jordan in his 2006 Midway project, which chronicled the harmful affects of plastic ingestion on an isolated albatross population near the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. I suggest that by reifying plastic as waste we risk removing it from larger material and social relations, and in this talk I suggest the need for a systemic critique of firstly, plastic’s material contiguity with the petroleum industry, and secondly, the uneven registration of plastic as both hazardous waste and desirable modern commodity. The second half of this paper discusses Karen Tei Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rainforest and its depiction of environmental degradation, commodity frontiers and speculative frenzy in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest. Throughout this paper, aesthetic forms, from the toxic sublime to the telenovela, problematize future effective action against a material that is indefinitely enduring, infinitely transmutable and systemically entangled in wider energy-consumption networks. Amber Murrey – Land, Place and Violence in ‘Narratives of Loss’ Along the Chad-Cameroon Oil PipelineDPhil Candidate in Geography, University of Oxfordamber.murrey-ndewa@jesus.ox.ac.ukIn this presentation, I will explore everyday life in two Cameroonian towns, Kribi and Nanga-Eboko, which are being reshaped by intersecting resource extraction projects. I argue that structural violence is a powerful conceptual framework for illustrating the intersections between discrete patterns of violence, including the ways in which disparate violences are compounded as they are experienced in people’s everyday lives. A multidimensional structural analysis attuned to agency is necessary to analyse these rural areas, which are at the centre of an exploitative global matrix composed of concurrent extractive projects. I analyze the multitude of corporate and economic interests that convene and intervene in these ‘local’ spaces: In Nanga-Eboko the matrix is composed of oil extraction, land acquisition for a rice-for-export plantation, sugar cane plantations and illegal logging. Kribi is shaped by a matrix of oil extraction, land grabs for tourist projects, commercial fishing and the construction of the Kribi Deep Sea Port. In such settings, a focus on 'just one' extractive project fails to illustrate the ways in which people's livelihoods and lives are being simultaneously affected by multiple and overlapping large-scale capitalist projects.Drawing from Rob Nixon’s ‘slow violence’ and Paul Farmer’s articulations of ‘structural violence’, I focus on people’s interpretations and experiences of structural violence. In this case study, I highlight two manifestations of structural violence along the pipeline: land dispossession and ‘displacement in-place’. Displacement in-place is a form of abandonment displacement through the destruction of local livelihoods and large-scale ecological damage, which destroy people’s home landscapes without displacing them far from it (physical displacement did happen in some places, but only at short distances). Instead of displacing people from their land, these projects transform landscapes, leaving people displaced at-home with contaminated water sources, soil and coastal erosion, deforestation and oil spill pollution. People’s narratives of the experiences of living alongside multiple extractive projects provide nuanced insights into the material production and contestation of structural violence in local spaces.Panel 5: Appropriating ConservationAnnette LaRocco – The comprehensive hunting ban: conservation, resource-use, and contestation in postcolonial BotswanaPhD Candidate in Politics, Trinity College, University of Cambridgeaal33@cam.ac.ukContestations over conservation have emerged as key fault lines between thestate, citizens and economic actors operating in Botswana. Beginning in January2014, the Government of Botswana announced there would be an indefinite, nation-wide ban on hunting. This transition away from a consumptive‐use model indicates a significant shift in the country’s long‐term conservation and land-?use strategies, altering who may profit from conservation spaces and how conservation is made lucrative for the state. This paradigm shift brings into focus the ways the creation and maintenance of the conservation estate can function as a process of postcolonial state formation, as well as a site of resistance to such endeavors. Unfolding conservation processes, like the hunting ban, evoke the relationship between the state and rural space, highlight the manner in which a state’s authority over land is contested, negotiated or imposed, underscore contentious notions of resource ownership, access and use, and draw attention to the state’s (in)capability to enact coercive control over citizen behavior. This paper draws on over eight months of empirical fieldwork in Botswana’s Okavango Delta and Central Kalahari ecological and conservation areas, as well as in the capital, Gaborone. Its findings are informed by interviews with key stakeholders, including government officials, elected representatives, civil society, private sector operators in both the tourism and cattle industries, and most importantly, among rural dwellers living adjacent to large conservation spaces. By examining the hunting ban, this paper is a timely contribution to the study of contemporary (re)negotiations and contestations regarding the conservation paradigm. This process speaks to the larger role of conservation as a state-?‐building mechanism in postcolonial Botswana. The strategic use of conservation policy may be employed by the state in attempts to promote particular land uses, lifestyles, and identities among rural citizens, as well as in efforts secure the state’s economic and territorial integrity, coercive and enforcement power, profit-?‐generating capability and international prestige.Sam Perks – Representing Homo Oeconomicus: Capitalist Relations in Planet EarthMA Student, University of Yorksp698@york.ac.ukPlanet Earth is one of dozens of BBC nature documentaries that present non-human nature to a mass audience – an audience that has grown exponentially with the successful export of this documentary product to countries around the world. This paper will ask: what sort of natural world does Planet Earth envisage? What roles are played by the camera-operators who glory in their capture of footage, and the editing team who arrange shots to fit the overlying narrative to be purred by Attenborough? Where do humans – and, specifically, documentary-makers – fit in the grand classificatory depiction of life on planet Earth?This paper argues that the Planet Earth production team regulate perceptions of non-human animal behaviour to fit widely-comprehensible capitalist terminology, whilst neglecting to explain their own behaviour in the same terms. Their reasons for doing this are twofold: the existing naturalist, ethological and sociobiological discourses of animals describes non-human animal behaviour in economic language, and Planet Earth cannot help but replicate this outlook by adhering to the evolutionary narrative. In addition, economic language is immediately accessible, as it offers a rational explanation for animal activity in terms that apply to human behaviour in the capitalist system. By exploring the tenets of the nature documentary genre, in conjunction with the economic discourse of the evolutionary narrative, this paper will show the contrast between the technically-oriented representations of non-human animals and the jovial, inclusive tone of the Diaries segment of Planet Earth episodes. Scrutinising the nature documentary-makers through their own systematising lens reveals an editorial decision to obscure the ultra-rational homo oeconomicus as manifested in the camera-wielding humans of Planet Earth.Panel 6: Human and Nonhuman SelvesFrances Hemsley – Human hides, Animal skins: Marechera and Zimbabwean Environmental PolicyPhD Candidate, University of Leedsen12fch@leeds.ac.ukThis paper reads figurations of the psychical skin in Marechera, a concept I adapt from Anzieu’s psychoanalytic theory of the skin ego and its auxiliary psychical envelope. In Marechera, psychical envelopes are often continuous with acute animal suffering, while psychical skins are not exclusively anthropomorphic. I suggest that histories of settler racism affect the fantasies and figurations of psychical skins, particularly their animalisation. In Zimbabwe wildlife, and the environment it inhabits, is a lucrative resource. It is the focus of a growing tourism industry, while particular conservation and sustainable development policies (which often operate to the exclusion of local peoples and knowledges) attract funds from aid donors. Conservation policy in Zimbabwe has often had to adapt with little modification colonial forms of land management (the creation of reserved lands and waterways, centralization, the perceived need to address ecological degradation by de-stocking the Communal Lands). Thus, asking how histories of settler racism affect the fantasies and figurations of psychical skins enables me to consider how these psychical skins might relate to future environmentalisms. In other words, I ask what implications there might be for postcolonial eco-critical theory if the construction of a psychical skin, which has the structure of an envelope or even an interface, is inflected by settler racism and colonial socio-spatial assignments. The ego, in Anzieu’s theory, constitutes itself, first and foremost, on a tactile foundation so the notion of the skin ego provides a plausible link between the psyche and the sensate, the self and its tactile environments. With Marechera, I suggest that we can read beyond the biological bedrock of the psychical container, for a psychical ecology that links skin experience (never exclusively ‘human’) to postcolonial environmentalisms. A psychical ecology that moves beyond a specifically human skin and a biological bedrock can contribute to interdisciplinary research on Zimbabwean environmental policy (Bassett and Crummey 2003, Keeley and Scoones 2003). This work has identified in particular the need to move beyond any straightforward assumptions of an apolitical scientific approach to conservation and resource management.Margot Young – Decolonising Subjectivity and Intolerable Bestial OthersPsychoanalyst, independent scholar and authormargotyoung@regent.In History of Madness Foucault identified a shift in conceptions of animality, which had been synonymous with madness and deviance during the “great confinement”, but which became increasingly associated with “harmonious” nature during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, even while real nonhumans were becoming subject to regimes of industrial scale confinement, consumption and reproduction.In this paper I will argue that shifting conceptions of animality were bound to the emergence of specifically human subjectivities that were intrinsic to agricultural, colonial and biopolitical government of land, and of the living as exploitable resource. Agro-colonial subjectivity has instituted an interiorised norm predicated on separation from rather then being situated amongst other beings. Nonhumans thus become fantasmic psycho-bio-political objects, inhabiting a space beyond the horizon of interior human psychic landscapes. Those who would not, or could not, become the subjects of colonial domestication; who were deemed inassimilable to agricultural and later, to agro-industrial resource exploitation were marginalised and extirpated. Native peoples and territorial nonhumans such as wolves were particular targets. Their demonization relates not only to their being seen as competitors for resources but to their signifying a trace of non-agricultural, or pre-agricultural, life. In this sense they came to represent the disavowed uncanny; the intolerable bestial other to colonial agriculturalism as normalisation. However colonial genocides and ecocides have not erased these traces. Resistances to the dualisms which cohere within discourses of ecological separativity, including primitive/civilised, animal/human, interior/exterior, deviance/normalcy can be found in indigenous and postcolonial reclamations which challenge normalised agro-colonial identities and the eco-bio-political government of the living and the land. I will illustrate my argument with specific reference to changing attitudes to wolves in North America and the significance of indigenous resistance to the reinstitution of government sanctioned wolf-hunts.Panel 7: Land, Environment and Resistance in Urban and Rural SpacesRebekah Cumpsty – Locating the Sacred in the City: Conceptual Mapping as Resistance in Johannesburg and New YorkPhD Candidate, Department of English and Related Literature, University of Yorkrllc501@york.ac.ukThis paper is concerned with how the tensions of diasporic non-belonging have led to the streets increasingly becoming a contested site of resistance, reappropriated through pedestrian mapping, as discussed in my roundtable paper, but further through the transposition and integration of African epistemologies within the modern, globalised, urban environment. In Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow and Teju Cole’s Open City pedestrian mapping is deployed alongside references to the ancestors and the Yoruba aegis, as a means of resisting the alienation, isolation and marginalisation experienced within the globalised cities of Johannesburg and New York respectively. Yet they go further by traversing, naming and narrativising the territory that has been covered, the protagonists of these two novels assert a hard-won knowledge of the streets, establishing a point of identification and belonging in the otherwise sprawling, anonymous mass of the city. Enacting an inversion of the colonial mapping and neo-colonial/neoliberal restructuring of these global metropoli, the two protagonists deploy conceptual and pedestrian mapping in order to individually claim an area of the city as their own. Moreover, in these two distinct globalised cities, representations of African belief systems firmly position the sacred within the city, this coupled with the considered repetition of walking and obsession with locality offers the potential for understanding this process as a ritualised reclamation and sacralisation of territory that is twice defamiliarised, once as a result of migration into the area and once as a consequence of urban restructuring. Thus, the sacralisation of the streets can be conceptualised as a strategy of resistance undertaken by the protagonists, reappropriating and resignifying urban spaces as particular localities capable of providing a new physical and ontological ‘home’ to their diasporic inhabitants.Puneet Dhaliwal – Zapatista Autonomy: Land and Indigenous ResistanceDphil Candidate, Department of Politics & International Relations, University of Oxfordpuneet.dhaliwal@stx.ox.ac.ukThe implementation of the NAFTA in 1994 heralded the intensification of historical processes of capitalist accumulation, which continue apace today, particularly through the dispossession and commodification of indigenous lands by multinational corporations (Harvey, 2003; 2005). For such reasons, the Zapatista movement denounced the NAFTA as a ‘death sentence’ for Mexico’s Indian population, and initiated a struggle for land and autonomy for indigenous communities. In this paper, I will explore the political character and transformative potential of the Zapatistas’ struggles over land, with the aim of accentuating the double-edged nature of local autonomy as a practice of resistance against neoliberal globalization. I will draw on primary fieldwork in Chiapas as well as theoretical literature on the movement in order to argue that autonomous communities, despite functioning as bulwarks against capital’s encroachment, may also permit the extension of neoliberal hegemony. On this basis, I will suggest that local struggles over land are best conducted under the aegis of a broader structural transformation of the capitalist world-system.I begin by sketching Zapatista autonomy as an experiment in local indigenous democracy that impedes land grabs by ecotourism developments and extractive industries, particularly mining. Nevertheless, these local efforts to ‘de-link’ from colonial and capitalist power structures (Mignolo, 2007) exhibit significant limitations in their emancipatory potential, both internally and externally. The persistence of repressive gender hierarchies within Zapatista communities, for instance, undercuts their integrity as liberated spaces beyond state and capital (Mentinis, 2006). Moreover, contrary to romanticized readings of the Zapatistas’ revolutionary or anti-imperial impact (Holloway, 2002; Tully, 2008), the dispersed nature of local autonomy may leave it vulnerable to containment and co-optation by neoliberal hegemony. Accordingly, I conclude that effective resistance to neoliberal globalization requires that practices of local autonomy be integrated into a broader project for the structural transformation of the capitalist world-system.Panel 8: Aesthetics of Resistance and Resistant Reading PracticesKaren Jackson – Modes of Revealing and Rupturing the Rhetorical and Cognitive Routines of Consumer Culture in Larissa Lai and Rita Wong’s long poem sybil unrestPhD Candidate, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada jacksokl@mcmaster.caMy paper examines Larissa Lai and Rita Wong’s collaborative long poem sybil unrest (2008) as a text that rhetorically operates to resist capitalism’s routinized temporal rhythm in order to dismantle the restrictions its mechanistic propulsion imposes upon processes of critical reflection. I argue that rather than yielding to dominant discourse’s system of signification in order to articulate their critique, Lai and Wong reject its prescribed meaning by constructing an aberrantly ordered language that challenges and impairs interpretative impulses and anticipations of the poem’s narrative trajectory. Consequently, Lai and Wong dislocate language and interpretative practice from the dominant flow of time, and, in doing so, they at once expose and reject the prescriptions of meaning that circulate within that temporality. Ultimately, I argue that Lai and Wong’s poem works to activate the critical processes of consciousness necessary for resistive or transformative social and political intervention that the routines of capitalist social life work to suspend, and that Lai and Wong work to recuperate the capitalist subject’s agency within the present and establish a viable terrain upon which to critique and contest the prescriptive forces of capitalism’s routinized temporality.Rebecca Duncan - Visceral Fiction: Rerouting Affective Economies in Contemporary South African LiteraturePhD Candidate, Gieβen Universityrebeccaduncan001@In this paper, I consider a selection of texts belonging to the still-amorphous – and not uncontentiously titled – ‘post-transitional’ South African canon that, over the past two years, has been increasingly identified with a turn to the popular in the country’s cultural production. Such texts, significantly, tend not lack political agenda. The work of Lauren Beukes, for example, the music of Die Antwoord and the films of Neil Blomkamp: all might be read as engagements with post- apartheid South Africa’s globalist faith in neo-liberal capital, and with the economic perpetuation of divisions that characterised the country under its old, oppressive administration. As such, these texts situate themselves in a precariously entangled position, critiquing the ebb and flow of global commodities even as they inhabit thoroughly commoditised generic forms. My paper interrogates this complex, complicit stance, and suggests that, in the rise of the politically engaged popular, we might begin to discern the shape of another especially critically productive inclination; one that might well be considered South African fiction’s ‘affective turn.’ After all, many of the forms cropping up in the post-millennial nation deal in – and are marketed for – their capacity to engender visceral reader reaction. Drawing on Hardt and Negri’s thinking around Empire as a world ambivalently underpinned by ‘affective labour,’ I venture that it is in the purposeful manipulation and activation of feeling in the reader – of horror, for example, disgust or tenderness – that recent productions seek to mobilize resistance. These fictions work towards an egalitarian, affirmative reconfiguration of exploitative relationships delineated in-text, doing so in a way that makes of readers themselves a resource, and they insist, too, that dissent remains possible, even under the universal, neo-colonial reach of global capital. Dominic Davies – Infrastructural Reading: How to Critique Cross-national Capital in Colonial LiteratureDPhil Candidate, University of Oxforddominic.davies@st-annes.ox.ac.ukThis paper develops a critical methodology built on the material and conceptual axis of World-Systems Theory as outlined by Wallerstein and others. The paper shows how world-systems’ analysis of an economic terrain can be translated into a cultural one. It then seeks to collapse what some have found to be reductive materialist divisions onto one another, answering Raymond Williams’ call ‘to replace the formula of base and superstructure with the more active idea of a field of mutually if also unevenly determining forces.’ The textual excavation of this ‘uneven field’ of ‘forces’ (an unevenness that recalls the analyses of cross-national capitalist development of Lenin and Trotsky) can, this paper will argue, be undertaken through a reading practice rooted in a dualistic, yet connected use of the word “infrastructure”. Infrastructure operates as a critical tool for opening up and comprehending a mutually sustaining relationship embedded within literary narratives, especially those concerned with colonial, postcolonial, and cross-national capitalist geographies: the use of infrastructures in the text, both metaphorically and symbolically, and the infrastructures of the text, be they geographic, social or economic. Infrastructural routes are not only a loci of economic capital investment abroad. They are also invested with, to take Pierre Bourdieu’s terminology, ‘symbolic capital’. Literary representations of infrastructure can thus be read as cultural equivalents of a networked economic ‘core’ in relation to the peripheral zones that lie beyond their borders. The translation of the dynamic relationality and interdependence between core and periphery from an economic into a cultural terrain reveals the way in which literary texts register varying degrees of ‘alterity’: a cultural and geographic space that contains, nested within it or gestured to by it, the capacity for resistance. The traces of peripheral resistance to networks of capital—from the imperial webs of the British Empire to the informal, de-centred circuits of neoliberal globalisation—thus shadow the infrastructures of textual productions. Through the development of this methodology, the paper looks toward an assessment of the impact that a cultural strata might have upon economies of world-systems.BiographiesBürge Abiral I am currently pursuing a Masters in Cultural Studies at Sabanc? University in Istanbul, Turkey. I received my BA from Williams College, USA, in 2011 with Honors in Anthropology and became a member of Phi Beta Kappa Society. I have recently worked on the written memories of politically active women who were incarcerated during the 1980-1983 military junta in Turkey. My article named “Silencing Sexual Violence and Vulnerability: Women’s Narratives of Incarceration during the 1980-1983 Military Junta in Turkey” will be published in Gendered Wars, Gendered Memories (eds. Andre Pet? and Ay?e Gül Alt?nay, Ashgate Publishing). I am a member of the organizing committee of Gendered Memories of War and Political Violence Young Researchers Conference, to be held in Sabanc? University in April 2014. Also working as a translator, I recently finished translating Toward an Anthropology of Women (ed. Rayna Reiter, 1975) to Turkish. I’m currently doing fieldwork for my MA thesis research in which I focus on permaculture as a social movement and ethical practice, and investigate how permaculture practitioners define the political.Hannah BoastHannah Boast is a third year PhD Candidate in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York, co-supervised in the Department of Geography at the University of Sheffield. Her research focuses on representations of water and ecological crisis in contemporary Israeli and Palestinian literature, and her work has been published in Green Letters, Jewish Quarterly, and is forthcoming in Journal of Commonwealth Literature. She coordinates the AHRC-funded research network Imagining Jerusalem, c. 1099 to the Present Day, and is a member of the White Rose Research Network on Hydropolitics.Hugh Crosfield I studied for my BA in human geography and MA in cultural geography at Royal Holloway University of London, where I remained for the duration of my doctorate. In February 2014 I successfully defended my PhD entitled 'Commodity boycotts, activist bodywork and race'. To date my empirical focus has been on Dutch anti-apartheid activism and contemporary anti-trafficking advocacy, but my research is more broadly concerned with understanding how activists 'do work' to particular bodies and commodities in order to engage different audiences and produce a range of emotions, solidarities and responsibilities. I am also interested in the 'work' achieved by the materiality of particular commodities in relation to social movement politics. The recent neoliberalization and 'responsibilization' of consumer morality has meant interrogating the meaning of these coalitions of materiality, affect and philanthropy with a critical approach to the goods and values added to antislavery.Rebekah CumpstyRebekah Cumpsty completed her NRF funded MA at the University of Cape Town. She is currently a PhD researcher at the University of York, supervised by David Attwell and partially funded by the Oppenheimer Memorial Trust. She is researching constructions of the sacred in African postcolonial literature. Her research offers a transnational comparative analysis of the production and construction of postsecular sacred spaces. Dominic DaviesDominic Davies is currently a third-year DPhil student at the University of Oxford under the supervision of Professor Elleke Boehmer. He is researching the way in which colonial literature set in the geographies of South Africa and South Asia at the height of the British Empire configure the relationship between imperial infrastructure and various forms of anti-imperial resistance. He is the Network Facilitator for the Leverhulme-funded Network, “Planned Violence: Post/colonial Urban Infrastructures and Literature”.Treasa De LoughreyTreasa De Loughry is a third-year Irish Research Council postgraduate scholar (comparable to AHRC), based in UCD's Humanities Institute and UCD’s School of English. Her research is supervised by Dr Sharae Deckard and Dr John Brannigan. Treasa's thesis examines how global fictions by Salman Rushdie, David Mitchell and Rana Dasgupta register world-systemic economic and ecological crises. Treasa is the recipient of the 2014/2015 Fulbright-National University of Ireland Humanities Student Award and will complete her PhD in University of California, Los Angeles. She is also a tutor on UCD’s “Critical Theory” module, a co-organiser of the 2013 “World-Ecology, World-Economy, World-Literature” symposium, and a co-organiser of the Dublin “Left Reading Group.”Puneet DhaliwalPuneet Dhaliwal is a scholar-activist and DPhil candidate in Political Theory at the University of Oxford. His doctoral research addresses global democratic theory from a de-colonial standpoint that challenges Eurocentric accounts of democratic politics and instead foregrounds the perspectives and practices of Third World resistance movements. He has published on the Zapatista movement, radical democratic theory, and the Spanish indignados movement. Prior to his doctoral studies, he worked as a campaigns officer at War on Want, campaigning for the regulation of private military and security companies. He has also conducted fieldwork and solidarity work in Zapatista communities in Chiapas, Mexico.Saira Fatima Dogar My name is Saira Fatima Dogar and I am a postgraduate research student in the School of English at the University of Leeds. I did my masters in Twentieth Century Literature from University of Sussex at Brighton. Before joining Leeds, I was working as an Assistant Professor in Department of English at Government College University, Lahore, Pakistan. I have taught courses in Postcolonial Literature and Modernist British Fiction to postgraduate classes for many years. I am currently on a study leave to pursue doctoral studies at Leeds. My research involves an analysis of space-body dynamics in Pakistani Writing in English in the works of Uzma Aslam Khan and Kamila Shamsie. My abstract proposes an analysis of water’s simultaneous evocation as a resource of exploitation and resistance in Uzma Aslam Khan’s novel Trespassing.Rebecca DuncanRebecca Duncan holds a DAAD doctoral fellowship at the University of Gieβen in Germany, where she is completing a PhD on the Gothic as a literary discourse of postapartheid anxiety. She is currently also a research fellow at the University of Stirling and has published work on post-millennial South African writing. Her research interests focus on contemporary South African cultural production, especially in relation to biopolitics, affective economics, and neo-liberalism and postcoloniality.Christine GilmoreChristine Gilmore is a third year PhD student at the University of Leeds where she is researching the impact of the Aswan High Dam and subsequent displacement on the Nubian community in Egypt through analysis of Nubian literary displacement narratives, employing an interdisciplinary approach which combines insights from the fields of literary studies, political ecology and development studies. Her thesis is provisionally titled 'Dams, Displacement and Development in Narratives of the Nubian Awakening'.Frances HemsleyFrances Hemsley is a first year PhD student at the University of Leeds. Her research interests are in postcolonial African and South Asian literatures, eco-critical theory and the psychoanalytic theory of Jean Laplanche and Didier Anzieu.Karen JacksonKaren Jackson is a Ph.D. candidate in her third year of study at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario Canada. Her dissertation research is on how American writers in the post-9/11 era conceive of government and politics as penetrating and manipulating everyday life through the notion of a national trauma and a consciousness of terror and risk.Annette LaRocco Annette has just returned from nearly nine months of fieldwork in Botswana, Conducting data collection in the Okavango Delta and Central KalahariConservation areas. In addition to her research, Annette is involved with the student group of the Centre of Governance and Human Rights and is an assistant editor for the Cambridge Review of International Affairs. Before coming to Cambridge she worked as a researcher in human rights policy in Washington, D.C. She also holds an MSc in African Studies from the University of Oxford, where she was a Clarendon Scholar.Priyasha MukhopadhyayPriyasha Mukhopadhyay is a DPhil candidate in English at the University of Oxford, where she is an Ertegun Scholar. Her thesis focuses on the role of the book as a material object in the construction of colonial readerships in South Asia. She also has a long-standing interest in the history of science and technology in the colonial period.Amber MurreyAmber Murrey is a PhD student in the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford. She will be completing her PhD thesis, "Lifescapes of a Pipedream: A Decolonial Mixed-Tape of Structural Violence and Resistance in Two Towns Along the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline", during the 2014/15 academic year as a Dissertation Write-Up Fellow in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at Boston College. Her research interests include decoloniality, PanAfricanism, militarism, structural violence, resistance and filmmaking.Jay ParkerMy work focuses on exploring the potential for creative conversations across political and literary boundaries. Supervised by Graham Huggan, my thesis stages a conversation between modern liberalism and four key political novels by Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1900), Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907), and Under Western Eyes (1911). Specifically, it examines the ways in which these novels deploy violence, and uses this to critique recent liberal understandings of self-actualisation, community, and nation, to show how class, imperialism, and gender are the unlikely challenges that emerge from the interaction between Conrad and liberalism. I won the Juliet McLauchlan prize in 2012, awarded by the Joseph Conrad Society (UK).Before starting my thesis, I worked as a teacher of literature, film, and theory of knowledge in Hong Kong, where I also coordinated educational action research in a range of schools across the territory. I continue to work in education, and am currently leading a public engagement project, working with the Brigshaw Trust and CapeUK to support teachers’ action research into creative learning.Sam PerksSam Perks is a student on the MA Culture and Thought After 1945 at the University of York. He has won an Anniversary Research Scholarship from the University of Leeds and will work towards a PhD on Malaysian and Singaporean novels, under the supervision of Professor Graham Huggan and Dr Anthony Carrigan.Lucy PotterLucy Potter is an AHRC funded PhD researcher working within the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York. Her research focuses on readings of food and foodways in world-literature, with a particular eye to questions of world-ecology in relation to agro-food regimes of accumulation. She has a long-standing interest in neoliberalism, particularly the significance of food in the context of neoliberalism's ongoing crisis. In 2013 she published an article in New Formations, co-written with her supervisor Dr Claire Westall, investigating ‘Neoliberal Britain’s Austerity Foodscape’.Nicola Robinson Nicola Robinson is a final year PhD candidate and part-time tutor in the department of English and Related Literature at the University of York. Her thesis is entitled “Resisting Development: Land and Labour in Israeli, Palestinian and Sri Lankan Literature.” She currently serves on the Editorial Board for the journal Postcolonial Text and her publications include articles in South Asian Review and Green Letters and book reviews for other refereed journals. Margot YoungMargot Young is a practising psychoanalyst, independent scholar and author. She developed and taught ecologically-oriented courses for psychoanalysts in training for the Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis, most recently on Judith Butler and queer ecologies. Her work questions psychoanalysis as an exclusionary discourse of the specifically human, and the sustainability of psycho-practices which re-iterate normalising and exclusionary spaces and boundaries. She is interested in the spatial and temporal delineations which structure psychological discourses, genealogies of animality and decolonising subjectivities. She has published papers on the ‘Wolf-Man’, eco-psychology and the human/animal divide, and Foucault and queer ecological critique. In collaboration with artist Sarah Hall she performed a piece at the Cosmopolitan Animals International Conference in London in 2012 entitled “From Wolf-Man to Dog-Woman: Psychoanalytic Boundary Crossings”, and has been working on chapters for edited collections on Queer Landscapes, and Wolves Werewolves and the Gothic.Conference Participants ................
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