ABSTRACT

This Handbook provides an essential guide to the study of resources and their role in socio-environmental change. With original contributions from more than 60 authors with expertise in a wide range of resource types and world regions, it offers a toolkit of conceptual and methodological approaches for documenting, analyzing, and reimagining resources and the worlds with which they are entangled.

The volume has an introduction and four thematic sections. The introductory chapter outlines key trajectories for thinking critically with and about resources. Chapters in Section I, "(Un)knowing resources," offer distinct epistemological entry points and approaches for studying resources. Chapters in Section II, "(Un)knowing resource systems," examine the components and logics of the capitalist systems through which resources are made, circulated, consumed, and disposed of, while chapters in Section III, "Doing critical resource geography: Methods, advocacy, and teaching," focus on the practices of critical resource scholarship, exploring the opportunities and challenges of carrying out engaged forms of research and pedagogy. Chapters in Section IV, "Resource-making/world-making," use case studies to illustrate how things are made into resources and how these processes of resource-making transform socio-environmental life.

This vibrant and diverse critical resource scholarship provides an indispensable reference point for researchers, students, and practitioners interested in understanding how resources matter to the world and to the systems, conflicts, and debates that make and remake it.

chapter 1|20 pages

Critical resource geography

An introduction

part Section I|70 pages

(Un)knowing resources

chapter 2|12 pages

Chimeras of resource geographies

Unbounding ontologies and knowing nature

chapter 3|9 pages

Knowing the storyteller

Geohumanities and critical resource geography

chapter 4|14 pages

Material worlds redux

Mobilizing materiality within critical resource geography

chapter 5|11 pages

Temporalities of (un)making a resource

Oil shales between presence and absence

chapter 6|11 pages

Brave new worms

Orienting (non)value in the parasite bioeconomy

part Section II|110 pages

(Un)knowing resource systems

chapter 8|11 pages

Resistance against the land grab

Defensoras and embodied precarity in Latin America

chapter 9|11 pages

Gender in extractive industry

Toward a feminist critical resource geography of mining and hydrocarbons

chapter 10|12 pages

The plantation town

Race, resources, and the making of place

chapter 11|14 pages

Materializing space, constructing belonging

Toward a critical-geographical understanding of resource nationalism

chapter 12|12 pages

Resources in a world of borders, boundaries, and barriers

Dividing, circumscribing, confining

chapter 13|15 pages

Pets or meat

A resource geography of dogs in China, from Chairman Mao (1949–1976) to the Pet Fair Asia Fashion Show (2015–2020)

chapter 14|10 pages

The social production of resources

A Marxist approach

part Section III|132 pages

Doing critical resource geography

chapter 17|13 pages

Life with oil palm

Incorporating ethnographic sensibilities in critical resource geography

chapter 18|10 pages

Institutional ethnography

A feminist methodological approach to studying institutions of resource governance

chapter 19|11 pages

Critical physical geography

In pursuit of integrative and transformative approaches to resource dynamics

chapter 20|12 pages

Praxis in resource geography

Tensions between engagement and critique in the (un)making of ecosystem services

chapter 21|12 pages

Negotiating the mine

Commitments, engagements, contradictions

chapter 22|14 pages

Intergenerational equity and the geographical ebb and flow of resources

The time and space of natural capital accounting

chapter 23|11 pages

Research as action and performance

Learning with activists in resource conflicts

chapter 24|12 pages

Engaged research with smallholders and palm oil firms

Relational and feminist insights from the field

chapter 25|12 pages

Renewable energy landscapes and community engagements

The role of critical resource geographers beyond academia

chapter 26|10 pages

Learning about coal frontiers

From the mountains of Appalachia to the streets of South Baltimore

chapter 27|14 pages

Teaching critical resource geography

Integrating research into the classroom

part Section IV|120 pages

Resource-making/world-making

chapter 29|13 pages

From gold to rosewood

Agrarian change, high-value resources, and the flexible frontier-makers of the twenty-first century

chapter 31|12 pages

Anadromous frontiers

Reframing citizenship in extractive regions. The salmon industry in Los Lagos, Chile

chapter 32|8 pages

Extracting fish

chapter 33|12 pages

Human tissue economies

Making biological resources

chapter 34|11 pages

Making, and remaking, a world of carbon

Uneven geographies of carbon sequestration

chapter 35|13 pages

World-making and the deep seabed

Mining the Area beyond national jurisdiction

chapter 36|16 pages

World-making through mapping

Large-scale marine protected areas and the transformation of global oceans

chapter 37|12 pages

Mapping resources

Mapping as method for critical resource geographies