Resources
The Resources subproject (Gavin Bridge, leader) critically explored how polar geophysical environments shape the political, economic, and cultural practices through which natural resources are acquired and assembled as commercially valuable assets. Historically, northern environments have been sites of resource economies and non-renewable resource development. Today the Arctic is again a ‘frontier’ for the development of new energy, mineral, and aquatic resources. While there is already substantial research on the technical challenges of working in polar environments, there has been relatively little attention to how the geophysical properties and environmental dynamics shape institutions of property and regulation, and the practices of ‘economization’ by which Arctic materials (fish, ores, hydrocarbons) are made into commercial resources. The Resources subproject examined how institutions and practices of resource development in frozen regions are adapted to the materialities of polar environments, deliberately suspending an initial distinction between ‘commercial’ and ‘traditional’ forms of resource making in favour of a transversal perspective focussed on how resource economies incorporate, in different ways, the materialities of polar nature.
Indeterminate and Changing Environments: Law, the Anthropocene, and the World
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