Events

This workshop is organized by the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore (NUS), with funding support from the NUS Presidential Young Professorship whitespace grant on the project titled “Critical Minerals in Context: Investment, Entrepreneurialism, and Techno-Diplomacy in Malaysia, Australia, and the United States”.

What exactly is the “circular economy,” and what kinds of workers and affective investments are coming into being as the concept of the circular economy has been taken up around the globe? In recent years, engineers and policymakers in many countries have leveraged anxieties over access to so-called “critical minerals” to justify new mines and to promote research on secondary extractive techniques, including processes for deriving minerals from mining wastes and discarded electronics – hopeful routes, some spokespersons promise, towards developing a new “circular economy” for materials production. The social entailments of this new economy, however, are far from clear. Emergent critical minerals development projects have alternately served as targets for rural economic development; sites for job training and technical capacity building; case studies for emergent “circular economy” initiatives and policy debates; arenas for debates over shifting environmental impact assessment procedures; and objects of citizen science. Across these spaces of engagement, prospective resource workers and members of affected communities have been positioned alternately as savvy entrepreneurs, communities at risk, and as passive beneficiaries of state-sponsored development. Such interventions are not simply economic or environmental, proponents insist: energy transitions must enable individuals to move beyond conventional resource labor by developing sophisticated technical skills and weaving these new skills into their future aspirations. While social scientists are beginning to examine the localized social impacts of the new mines, research sites, and waste processing facilities being developed to meet these demands, new approaches are required to understand the new kinds of social, spatial, and technological linkages being generated among these diverse forms of work. As processes for acquiring critical minerals are being redesigned and reframed, in other words, fundamental concepts of technoscientific interconnection are being remade.

This workshop will contribute to new research on the changing relations between resource work and knowledge work, and on the shifting temporalities and technological imaginaries through which the many people working at these interfaces experience economic life and environmental risk. The meeting will also offer a space for examining how shared engagements with complex extractive projects and emergent technologies enact new forms of anticipation and affective connection. Unlike large-scale mines, many of these spaces related to critical minerals development are not traditionally understood as spaces of politics. While job training programs and other initiatives designed to solicit local support for new mines have received increasing attention from social scientists, new forms of outreach around critical minerals exploration and processing sites entail different imaginative horizons. As critical minerals development projects become intertwined with complex supply chain issues, impact-benefit agreement negotiations, and environmental disputes, geologists and promoters must increasingly articulate residents’ interests with vernacular knowledge about global processes of exchange and multinational development. By encouraging conversation and comparative analysis, the workshop will examine how these and other vernacular forms of expertise emerge in everyday conversations about critical minerals and emergent technologies.

WORKSHOP CONVENORS

Asst Prof Tom ÖZDEN-SCHILLING
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, National University of Singapore

Assoc Prof Jiat Hwee CHANG
Asia Research Institute & Department of Architecture, National University of Singapore

REGISTRATION

Registration is closed, and instructions on how to participate in this hybrid workshop has been sent out to registered attendees. Please write to aritm@nus.edu.sg if you would like to attend the event.