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Call for contributions: Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, Los Angeles, 9–13 April, 2013. *The production of nature* Sponsored by the Animal Geography Specialty Group, the Cultural and Political Ecology Specialty Group, and the Socialist and Critical Geography Specialty Group. Organizers: Freyja Knapp, University of California, Berkeley Mazen Labban, Rutgers University *We dedicate this session to the memory of Neil Smith, 1954–2012.* For millennia people have employed microorganisms in productive activities ranging from making beer and bread to extracting gold and silver. The design and deployment of microbial processes for productive purposes, however, has expanded rapidly in recent decades. Advances in biochemistry, molecular biology and genetics have produced a plethora of microorganisms capable of performing productive functions across a wide variety of activities, and have supported the engineering of new microbial processes in agriculture, medicine, manufacturing, mineral and hydrocarbon extraction, environmental bioremediation, and energy production, to name the most prominent examples. Such deployments of biotechnology have attracted increasing attention from geographers and others studying their economic, (geo)political and ethical implications. Besides the laboratory studies that have been developed in great detail within science and technology studies, critical studies of biotechnology have largely remained confined to the agricultural, pharmaceutical and biomedical industries. The expansion of biotechnologies in other fields and the enrollment of microbial labor in new production regimes, however, raise broader questions concerning nature-space-society and are therefore ripe for critical analysis. We seek studies of the creative role of microorganisms in the extraction of materials and energy that employ a broad understanding of extraction beyond extractive industry proper and that revisit critically the production of nature thesis: production of nature as production by nature. Some of the questions that we have been entertaining are: how does the work of microorganisms articulate with human labor in extractive activities? What is the contribution of microbial forms of life to the production and circulation of value in extractive processes, and what are the effects of the use of microorganisms on our understanding of labor exploitation? What political, economic and spatial determinations—past, ongoing or imminent determinations—give rise to the employment of microbial work in extractive production? What are the effects of such uses on the materiality (spatio-temporality) of extraction and the spatio-temporal rhythms of capital accumulation? What role does microbial production/reproduction play in the greening of industrial processes? What are the temporal and scalar frictions between microbial processes and human production systems? We offer those questions to stimulate and provoke, and we invite others. We are particularly interested in research that problematizes the boundaries between extraction and other forms of productive activity, biologically based production and non-biologically based production, human and nonhuman production systems. The session format will depend on the responses we get—we welcome research papers as well as shorter essays: research proposals, critical reflections, ideas. Please send expression of interest, inquiries and abstracts to Freyja Knapp (fre...@berkeley.edu) and Mazen Labban (lab...@rci.rutgers.edu) by Monday, October 22. Mazen Labban Visiting Assistant Professor Department of Geography Rutgers University Lucy Stone Hall 54 Joyce Kilmer Avenue Piscataway, NJ 08854-8045 lab...@rci.rutgers.edu http://rutgers.academia.edu/Labban Senior Editor Capitalism Nature Socialism http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcns20
