Gisa Weszkalnys

Although mostly localized and "grounded," the process of mineral resource extraction is hardly fixed or static. Its pace and intensities are shaped, among other things, by notions of geological potential as well as practical, moral, and aesthetic value; by the cyclicality of commodities markets, state policy, and fiscal regimes; by the availability of equipment, infrastructures, and expertise; by epistemic and risk management techniques; by expectant imaginations of profit and progress; and by the physical limits of labouring bodies. Critical resource scholarship in anthropology, geography, and related social sciences has sought to integrate these material, temporal, and affective dynamics that together constitute extraction (e.g., Bakker and Bridge 2006; Barry 2014; Ferry and Limbert 2008; Richardson and Weszkalnys 2014). This work aims to deepen our understanding of the uneven and unequal processes that connect the "above-ground" and "below-ground" in extractive encounters. It departs from an essentialist category of resources embedded, for example, in an earlier Marxian historical materialism or in resource management approaches, and from the deterministic assumptions of resource curse theories. Rather than assuming resources to be pre-given in nature, ready to be discovered and put to use, it reveals resource making as both spatially and temporally dispersed, resulting in historicized and deeply contested "resource materialities" (Richardson and Weszkalnys 2014: 8).

This is a contribution to the special section "100s for Katie," which celebrates Kathleen Stewart's work. It reflects on the capacity of dreams to embody the affective stakes of ethnographic fieldwork. KEYWORDS affect, dreams, fieldwork, patchwork ethnography

The shaping of post-carbon worlds is as much about figuring out what is to come as about dealing with what endures. For the hydrocarbons industry, this involves the permanent closure, plugging, and abandonment of oil and gas wells, and the dismantling, disposal or recycling of physical installations. In mature hydrocarbon basins, such as the U.K.'s North Sea, the so-called decommissioning of assets

A large public square in Berlin's eastern part, Alexanderplatz was rebuilt in the 1960s as an exemplar of socialist planning. In the 1990s, it became a problem for urban planners and ordinary Berliners. Drawing on ethnographic material, the author offers a multifaceted account of how disorder is experienced, governed, and materialized in Alexanderplatz. Talk about disorder has provided a way of discussing the dislocations accompanying unification and the vanishing of a socialist ideal. But it may also be understood as a commentary on the perceived failures of government and the social. These discourses involve two distinct conceptions of “society” and “the social.” One is a familiar notion of the social as a problem space; the other is a utopian notion of society as an unattained ideal, characteristic of state socialism. The author suggests how attempts to create order, such as the new design proposed for Alexanderplatz, can appear to produce the disorder they proclaimed to cont...

Recent anthropological approaches to temporality and spatiality can offer particularly important insights into established planning theories. In this introductory essay, we consider planning as a manifestation of what people think is possible and desirable, and what the future promises for the better. We outline how plans can operate as a particular form of promissory note, and explore how plans may be seen to perform a particular kind of work, laying out diverse kinds of conceptual orders while containing a notion of the state as an unfulfilled idea. The task of the ethnographer is to chart the practices, discourses, technologies, and artifacts produced by planning, as well as the gaps that emerge between planning theory and practice. We consider the changing horizons of expectation and the shifting grounds of government in different phases and forms of neoliberalization that are characteristic of planning in the contemporary world.

This article uses what the petroleum industry calls first oil to examine the uneven process of resource making on the margins of global zones of extraction. It explores how the double obscurity of hydrocarbon prospects—both geologically obscured and their worth not yet revealed by the market—generates particular material constraints, pauses, and setbacks characteristic of petroleum production. The article draws on ethnographic and archival material from São Tomé and Príncipe (STP), where repeated attempts to explore offshore oil have yet to transform geological potential into an economic asset. It highlights the incongruous effects of certain epistemic practices and devices (contract, zone, and well) aimed at facilitating first oil by managing uncertainty. As a result, they work as gestures of an indeterminate matter whose existence continues to be doubted.

Published in Lori Leonard and Siba N. Grovogui (eds), Governance in the Extractive Industries: Power, Cultural Politics and Regulation. Earthscan from Routledge, 2017. This is an updated version of my article “Cursed resources, or articulations of economic theory in the Gulf of Guinea” published in Economy and Society 40(3).

In global debates about natural resource extraction, affect has played an increasingly prominent, if somewhat nameless, role. This article proposes a theorization of resource affect both as an intrinsic element of capitalist dynamics and an increasingly problematized object of corporate, government, and third sector practice. Drawing on ethnographic research in São Tomé and Príncipe (STP), I explore the affective horizons generated by the prospect of hydrocarbon exploration: a doubtful hope comprised of visions of material betterment, personal and collective transformation, as well as anticipations of failure, friction, and discontent. I also examine to the multitude of oil-related campaigns, activities, and programmes initiated by NGOs and global governance institutions in STP, animated by the specific conundrums presented by oil’s futurity. In light of this, I argue that what we see emerging is a new resource politics that revolves not simply around the democratic and technical aspects of resource exploitation but increasingly their associated affective dissonances and inconsistencies.

This article uses what the petroleum industry calls “first oil” to examine the uneven process of resource making on the margins of global zones of extraction. It explores how the double obscurity of hydrocarbon prospects—both geologically obscured and their worth not yet revealed by the market—generates particular material constraints, pauses, and setbacks characteristic of petroleum production. The article draws on ethnographic and archival material from São Tomé and Príncipe (STP) where repeated attempts to explore offshore oil have yet to transform geological potential into an economic asset. It highlights the incongruous effects of certain epistemic practices and devices (contract, zone, and well) aimed at facilitating first oil by managing uncertainty. As a result, they work as gestures of an indeterminate matter whose existence continues to be doubted.

Here, I analyse the temporal politics of economic disaster associated with prospective oil exploration in the African Atlantic island state of São Tomé and Príncipe (STP). I call this politics the ‘not yet’ of disaster – a temporality in which future disaster has effects in the present. The theories and practices of social scientists, global policy institutions, and advocacy groups have contributed to an ontology of oil as a disastrous matter that may cause a ‘resource curse’. Focusing on STP’s anticipated oil resources, I ask what political forms, objects and effects are generated by what some consider a disaster in the making. I trace the role of anticipation as a specific temporal disposition, particularly among Santomean state officials and members of civil society, which substitutes fresh certainties and uncertainties about what oil might bring. These include suspicions and uncertainties regarding the operations of anticipation itself. Suspicion, I suggest, is not the target of anticipation but implicated in its practice and may even call it into doubt, thus redirecting anticipation against itself.

Economic experiments, or attempts to shape national and local economies with the help of economic theory, have been typical of post-war development efforts. Economic sociologists have explored the role of such experiments to demonstrate how economics ' - as a set of practices, ideas and technologies - enacts its worlds. This paper examines one such case of high-powered economic theory and its enactment in an emergent West African oil economy by focusing on economist Jeffrey Sachs’s advisory project in São Tomé and Príncipe. It pivots on the ‘resource curse’, an economic device that has recently gained purchase in global policy circles. This paper argues that economic devices are not simply imposed on prearranged worlds. Instead, they collide with and adjust to already existing politico-economic and socio-cultural conditions, resulting in complex articulations. Drawing on ethnographic material, I critique the ability of the resource curse to make full sense of apprehensions of the past, present and future consequences of extractive industry developments. Contrasting economic accounts of an incipient curse with competing and complementary local accounts of the effects of oil wealth, I propose a new model for the sociological analysis of the variety of articulations into which an economic device, such as the curse, may enter.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in post-unification Berlin, this article examines the re-articulation of the problematic of “the social” in city planning. It juxtaposes the contrasting visions of city planners and youth workers for Alexanderplatz, a controversial square in Berlin's eastern centre. I argue that the notion of “robustness” is helpful in understanding an important contemporary shift in thinking about planning and the social. In a sense, both planners and youth workers accused each other of taking insufficient notice of “the social.” While planners spoke of robustness as a technical, economic and aesthetic quality to which public space needs to aspire, the youth workers' vision for Alexanderplatz was a proposal for a kind of “social” robustness where the social is, quite literally, built into the urban design. These ethnographic observations need to be understood in a context where city planning has been one of the most critical domains in which the tensions provoked by German unification are played out. Taking such socio-cultural specificities into account will lead to a more nuanced understanding of forms of neoliberal city planning.