Timely Assets: The Politics of Resources and Their Temporalities

by Elizabeth Emma Ferry (Editor)

Oil is running out. What's more, its final depletion, once relegated to a misty future, now seems imminent. In all the more or less apocalyptic discussions of oil and similar depleted resources, nature, labor, and time converge. This volume focuses on how resources, resource-making, and resource-claiming are entangled with experiences of time. Particular expressions of "resource imaginations" often have a strongly temporal they frame the past, present, and future in certain ways; they propose or preclude certain kinds of time reckoning; they inscribe teleologies; they are imbued with affects of nostalgia, hope, dread, spontaneity, and so on. Examining resources as various as silver in Mexico, "diversity" in an American university, and historical documents in Indonesia, the contributors to this volume ask several Under what conditions and with what consequences do people find something to be a resource? What kinds of temporal experiences, concepts, or narratives does thinking of things as resources entail? How does the making and imagining of resources assume or condition particular understandings of past, present, and future? How do understandings of time shape the ways resources are named, managed, or allocated?

298 pages, Paperback

First published November 15, 2008

Reviews

[Pete · Rating 3 out of 5]

suggestive theoretical apparatus, boring and unimaginative execution in the case studies.