Dear colleagues,
We are looking for contributors to our session on “Geographies of Worth: Resources, Valuation and Contested Economization” at the German Congress of Geography in Berlin, October 2015. (http://www.dkg2015.hu-berlin.de/index.php?article_id=21). Most of the contributions to the conference will be probably in German, but English language contributions have increased over the past years (...Germany is globalizing) and are welcomed to this panel. Stefan Ouma and Peter Lindner, Department of Human Geography, Goethe University Frankfurt Please find the abstract below: Geographies of Worth: Resources, Valuation and Contested Economization Global markets for agricultural goods and mineral resources have a centuries old colonial history. But during the last decade the modalities and geographies of the economization of resources, agricultural land and ‘nature’ (in its broadest sense) have changed fundamentally. New markets emerged – e.g. for carbon emissions and offsets, water rights, genetic codes or body parts – and others have been globalized and financialized in entirely new ways (e.g. the global market for farmland and agricultural as ‘alternative asset classes’). Despite significant individual differences, these new markets are characterized by a range of commonalities. First, they are often made up by complex and networked relationships of a variety of actors such as firms, states, international organizations and different intermediaries (e.g. standard setting bodies), whose agendas require coordination and translation amidst a field of potentially conflicting “orders of worth” (Boltanski/Thévenot 1991). Second, they are battlefields of knowledge and spaces of power, where actors with different resources as well as unequal cognitive, technical and political endowments are engaged in struggles for particular kinds of worth. Third, they depend on the successful framing of new commodities as well as on socio-technical, legal and moral infrastructures for the production, assignment and calculation of “value”. Yet, at the same time the very foundations and the modus operandi of these markets remain contested from different sides: changing international regulations, local resistances (emanating from national/local politics and/or affected social groups) and ethical considerations may all be sources of critique and disruption with regard to the institutionalization and operation of “resource markets”. We encourage the submission of presentations (20 minutes) dealing with: * The socio-economic, technical and legal production of value in resource economies. * The emergence and organization of markets for natural resources. * The mobilization of worth and commodities along global value chains. * The financialization of land, nature and natural resources. * The shifting power relations – global and local – that come along with the privatization, economization and mobilization of local resources for (global) markets. * Forms, pathways and targets of resistance against the marketization of resources. Please feel free to contact the organizers with any question concerning the outline of the session or the thematic ‘fitting’ of your potential contribution! <mailto:[email protected]> [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> [email protected]
