Keynote: Associate Professor Tom Nurmi (The Norwegian University of Science and Technology): ‘Quarry of Thought: Minerality and AI’

This symposium is generously supported by the UCD College of Arts and Humanities (CAH), the UCD Humanities Institute, and Research Ireland through the Starting Laureate ‘Minerals’ project.

7 November 2025

University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

Keynote Speaker: Associate Professor Tom Nurmi, Norwegian University of Science and Technology

Recent geopolitical contestations over Ukraine’s rare earths, global debates on ‘critical’ minerals in the context of green energy transitions, and growing scholarly engagement – such as Museum and Society’s recent special issue on minerals – have all highlighted the ethical, political, and environmental stakes of minerals.

This one-day, interdisciplinary symposium addresses these urgent concerns by bringing together scholars and professionals from the humanities, social sciences, arts, and museums to examine minerals as political and cultural agents. The term ‘critical’ in our symposium title carries a triple meaning: 1) it refers to minerals deemed essential for renewable energy transitions; 2) it addresses the urgent environmental and political challenges tied to resource extraction and securitisation; 3) it signals a critical scholarly approach to the cultural and political knowledge of critical minerals. By fostering interdisciplinary dialogue, this symposium aims to deepen the understanding of the geopolitical and environmental consequences of minerals, and to encourage more sustainable and ethical perspectives on the mineral foundations of our modern life.

Topics may include (but are not limited to):

• Ethical and political stakes of mineral demand in renewable energy transitions
• Construction, contestation, and circulation of cultural knowledge about minerals
• Minerals and literary imagination
• Minerals and art
• Minerals and archives
• Minerals in museum display and curatorship
• Evolution of mineral narratives
• Colonial histories underpinning today’s critical minerals discourse
• Minerals and imperial literary histories
• Nineteenth-century narratives of extraction
• Minerals, conflicts, and geopolitics
• Minerals and (non)human rights
• Minerals and domestic violence
• Minerals, green energy, and the climate crisis
• Minerals and racial capitalism
• Minerals and policymaking
• Alternative imaginaries of minerals and post-extraction futures
• Teaching critical minerals
• Researching critical minerals in the humanities

Submission Guidelines:

Please submit a proposal of 200–250 words along with a short bio (approx. 100 words) by 31 August 2025 to both organisers: ge.tang@ucd.ie and katie.donnelly1@ucdconnect.ie. We will notify applicants of acceptance by mid-September 2025.

This symposium is generously supported by the UCD College of Arts and Humanities (CAH), the UCD Humanities Institute, and Research Ireland through the Starting Laureate Minerals project. It is also supported by CAH’s research strands: Environmental Humanities, Thresholds of Knowledge, and Transnationalising the Humanities.

Modest travel bursaries will be available for PhD students and unwaged scholars. If you would like to be considered for a bursary, please indicate this in your proposal and attach a short CV.

Participants are invited to consider a wide array of materials, from extractive tools to architectures, from domestic artefacts to artworks created in mining fields, and from environmental remnants to archival records, etc. This roundtable aims to reveal how material culture can illuminate broader issues related to extractivism, including but not limited to race, gender, and environmental impacts, while also enabling the recovery of lost voices and stories.

Speakers:

• Dr Madhavi Jha, Assistant Professor, Birla Institute of Technology & Science, Pilani
• Dr Oliver Tappe, Substitute Professor, University of Kontstanz
• Dr Nicholas Y. H. Wong, Assistant Professor, University of Hong Kong

The aim is to foster a dialogue that transcends conventional definitions of genres and forms, to think about how extractivism can generate unique forms of representation, and how these forms, in turn, critically engage with the practices and ideologies of extractivism. Additionally, we aim to create a space where speakers and attendees can share the obstacles they have encountered when working with forms that pose linguistic, cultural, or methodological challenges, and to discuss how these challenges shape their interpretations and analyses.

Speakers:

• Dr Adelene Buckland, Department of English, King’s College London
• Dr Julia Ditter, Department of Literature, Art, and Media Studies, University of Konstanz
• Associate Professor Nathan K. Hensley, Department of English, Georgetown University
• Associate Professor Charlotte Rogers, Environmental Humanities, University of Virginia

We aim to gather literary critics and historians researching the intersections of extractivism and race, across different geographical regions and historical periods. Our goal is to foster a discussion that stretches across the global and the local, the past and the present. Central to our dialogue is an exploration of the origins of the ‘global colour line’ in the long histories of resource extraction.

Speakers:

• Dr Danielle Kinsey, Associate Professor, Department of History, Carleton University
• Dr Rebecca Macklin, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, School of Literatures, Languages, Music and Visual Cultures, University of Aberdeen
• Dr Nick McGee, Assistant Professor, Department of History, Durham University

Abstract: Taking an early twentieth-century sketchbook of South African mines and botanical gardens as its starting point, this work-in-progress will explore the tensions between itinerancy and being grounded in the artistic and literary discourses of mining and minerality, particularly those of the British southern settler colonies. Prompted to follow the literary form of the mining sketchbook and scrapbook, the paper will sketch, cut, paste and explore various sites of itinerancy and groundedness from the auriferous and diamondiferous to the garden abecedarium of colonialism.

You can read more about the interdisciplinary and dynamic programme by following the link below.

The discussion seeks to uncover how literary cultures or histories both challenge and reinforce the capitalist and imperialist foundations of these global networks that facilitate extraction, often at the expense of local communities and ecosystems. We aim to deepen our appreciation of the complex ways in which texts engage with extraction and its connections with infrastructures, particularly in the context of contemporary discussions such as decarbonisation, degrowth, and localisation.

Speakers:

• Dr Dominic Davies, Senior Lecturer in English, Department of Media, Culture, and Creative Industries, City University of London
• Dr Nicola Kirkby, Honorary Research Associate in English, Royal Holloway, University of London
• Associate Professor Aims McGuinness, History Department, Dolores Huerta Research Centre for the Americas, Latin American & Latino Studies, UC Santa Cruz

Roundtable I: ‘Extraction, Infrastructures, and Networks’

Date: 17th October 2024

Time: 4:30 pm – 5:40 pm (London & Dublin, BST)

Speakers:

• Dr Dominic Davies, Senior Lecturer in English, Department of Media, Culture, and Creative Industries, City University of London
• Dr Nicola Kirkby, Honorary Research Associate in English, Royal Holloway, University of London
• Associate Professor Aims McGuinness, History Department, Dolores Huerta Research Centre for the Americas, Latin American & Latino Studies, UC Santa Cruz

Roundtable II: ‘Extraction and Racial Capitalism’

Date: 21 November 2024

Time: 3pm (London & Dublin, GMT)

Speakers: 

• Dr Danielle Kinsey, Associate Professor, Department of History, Carleton University
• Dr Rebecca Macklin, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, School of Literatures, Languages, Music and Visual Cultures, University of Aberdeen
• Dr Nick McGee, Assistant Professor, Department of History, Durham University

MORE DETAILS TO FOLLOW SOON!

Dr Sarah Comyn and Dr Ge Tang presented on a panel investigating the global colour line as ‘event’, with Comyn presenting on her recent work on illicit diamond buyers in late nineteenth-century fiction, while Tang presented on a series of photographs depicting Chinese labourers arriving on the goldfields of South Africa.

The project’s PhD candidate, Katie Donnelly, presented on her new research on the depiction of women’s labour on the goldfields of Australia and New Zealand in children’s literature.

Abstract: 

Between the 1830s and 1960s, geological surveyors in India, Australia, southern and eastern Africa, and South America discovered evidence that contradicted the orthodox view of a stable Earth. What did it mean that coal seams in West Bengal and New South Wales were more recent than the great Carboniferous seams of Yorkshire and Pennsylvania? What exactly were the giant cone-shaped structures that punctured the crust of the diamond fields around Kimberley on South Africa’s highveld? What could the millions of microfossils retrieved from oil wells around the Red Sea tell geologists about the paleogeography of North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia? By thinking through these puzzles and engaging with the resources that inspired them, surveyors built the foundations of modern earth science and a new awareness of the Earth as a dynamic, unified system.

In this seminar I will discuss how the development of these new ideas about the Earth’s deep past emerged from the search for minerals and resources across the southern hemisphere and beyond. It is based predominantly on the work of surveyors such as William Blanford, Edward Dunn, Alexander du Toit, and William MacFadyen, who examined coal, diamonds, oil, and other commodities over more than a century. Their assessments of these resources encouraged thinking across both commodities and locations. I argue that this work with resources has been overlooked in the history of major 20^th century innovations like inner Earth geophysics and plate tectonics. Perhaps more importantly, though, this new view of the history of earth science from the ‘geological south’ places an interconnected colonial and postcolonial world right at the centre of planetary history. Such a view provides new historical ground for understanding both the geopolitics of a dynamic Earth and the forces of nature unleashed during the Anthropocene.

Dr Jarrod Hore is an environmental historian of settler colonial landscapes, nature writing, and geology, and is currently Postdoctoral Fellow with the New Earth Histories Research Program, University of New South Wales, Sydney. His work on earthquake geology, wilderness photography, early environmentalism, and the logistics of the natural history trade has been published in the Pacific Historical Review, Australian Historical Studies and the Journal of World History and he has presented research on the history of modern earth science at the University of Chicago, Harvard University, and the University of Houston. His award-winning first book, Visions of Nature: How Landscape Photography Shaped Settler Colonialism was published by University of California Press in 2022.

For online attendance please register via the link below.

Image Credit: Bailey Willis. Diagram of fieldwork conducted in the course of studies into global seismology, tectonic theory, and the genesis of continents, 1928-1930. Bailey Willis Papers, 1856-1957, Huntington Library, Los Angeles. B6F23.

Abstract: Challenging the emphasis on immateriality in discourses on photography, this talk focuses on the inextricable links between image-making and resource extraction, revealing how mining is a precondition of photography. Photography begins underground and, in photographs of mines and mining, frequently returns there. Through a materials-driven analysis of visual culture, I illustrate histories of colonization, labor, and environmental degradation to explore the ways in which photography is enmeshed within and enables global extractive capitalism. Reading materiality alongside representation and visual form reveals a complex picture of photography’s implication within extractive capitalism and, in turn, its potential to resist it.

Dr Siobhan Angus is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Carleton University. Prior to joining Carleton, Angus was the Banting Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of Art at Yale University. In 2023, she is a visiting scholar at the Yale Center for British Art. She holds a Ph.D. in Art History and Visual Culture from York University. Her dissertation was awarded the Governor General’s Gold Medal. Her research has been published or is forthcoming in Environmental Humanities, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, Radical History Review, Capitalism and the Camera (Verso, 2021) and October. Her book, Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography (Duke University Press 2024) explores the mineral history of photography through an emphasis on mined materials that have been used in photographic processes.

For online attendance please register via the link below.

Abstract: Some of the world’s most extensive extractive regimes emerged in Britain during the period 1770-1830, fuelling the first stages of the manufacturing boom commonly associated with the Industrial Revolution. Certain more visible sites of extraction—such as the Parys opencast copper mine in Wales—became places of significant cultural and artistic interest, featuring in fashionable domestic tours of Britain. From this emerged a plethora of landscape paintings, travel accounts, and poems that influence how we visualise extraction to the present day. While shedding a light on these industries, this early interest in extraction was nevertheless shaped by a specific set of social values and aesthetic forms. This talk takes a different approach to the visualisation of extraction, looking to working-class writers and artists working in or adjacent to extractive industries. Taking a comparative, class-based approach, I argue, reveals an undercurrent of different imaginings of extraction, its social and environmental impacts, than hitherto recognised.

Dr Adam Bridgen is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of English Studies at Durham University. His research project (2024-27) explores working-class literary responses to natural resource extraction during the British Romantic period. More broadly, he is interested in the social dimensions of anti-imperial and environmental thought across the long eighteenth century, recently publishing essays in Romantic Environmental Sensibility: Nature, Class and Empire (2022) and Animal Theologians (2023). He is currently co-editing a volume of collected essays, British Working-Class and Radical Writing since 1700, forthcoming with University of London Press.

For online attendance please register via the link below.

Abstract: This paper will show how the underwriting practices that developed with Britain’s imperial expansion in the Indian ocean critically shaped the very parameters of meteorology in the early 19th century. Analyzing navigational journals and insurance cases fought in the marine courts in India and the admiralty courts in London, the talk reflects on why tropical cyclones, instead of becoming limits to be overcome through scientific forecasting, were instead financialized and made profitable through a brisk and thriving underwriting business. Bridging economic and environmental history, the talk documents how the very modalities and frameworks for assessing climate disturbance emanated out of these webs of insurance and trade that enveloped the globe during this period.

Professor Debjani Bhattacharyya is the Chair for the History of the Anthropocene at the University of Zürich. Previously, she was an Associate Professor of History and Urban Studies at Drexel University. Her work lies at the intersection of legal and environmental history. Her research is driven by the desire to understand how legal and economic structures order our conceptualization of environmental transformations and shape how we respond to climate crises. Her book, Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta (Cambridge University Press, 2018) won the 2019 honorable mention for the best book in Urban History. It documented how legal experimentation through the 18th and 19th century was central to reshaping the political economy of urban land and waterscapes in the Bengal Delta. Currently Prof. Bhattacharyya is writing a long history of how marine insurance market’s risk apprehensions shaped weather knowledge, colonial oceanographic sciences and a derivatives market in climate futures in the Indian Ocean Region. She is also interested in developing alternatives to climate adaptation strategies of planned retreat along the Bay of Bengal coast.

For online attendance please register via the link below.