Limits to Growth? Resource Crises and Shifting Ideas of Global and Planetary Boundaries
Antje Dietze (SFB 1199), Nina Mackert (Leipzig U)
Limits to Growth? Resource Crises and Shifting Ideas of Global and Planetary Boundaries
Resource crises have been a recurring challenge to societies throughout history and have often been accompanied by ruptures in conceptions of both global orders and planetary boundaries. With the aim of taking a closer look at this connection, we ask, first, if and how diagnoses of resource scarcity have contributed to major shifts in understandings of global orders on the one hand, and the earth and its finite resources, on the other. We focus on how such crises challenged hitherto stable conceptions of capitalism, led to a critique of Western models of progress, or fostered a turn to new epistemologies of the planetary.
Second, by historizing the social, cultural, and political processes that turned something into a resource, we are interested in understanding the impact of epistemic fragmentations themselves on these resourcifications. Have changing understandings of the “limits to growth” not only been the result of resource scarcity, but also catalyzed these diagnoses and fueled new resourcifications, such as new sources of energy and food? The panel aims to take a fresh look at different moments in history when anxieties about resource depletion met with shifts in in the understanding of global capitalist orders and planetary limits.
Panel 3 im Ramen der ReCentGlobe Jahrestagung 2023
Dr. Antje Dietze (SFB 1199, Leipzig University, Germany)
Antje Dietze studied cultural studies in Leipzig and Paris, earning her PhD in 2012 from Leipzig University for a work on the role of cultural organizations and artistic practice during the post-socialist transition in Germany. As part of her current research she spent 2014/15 as a German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) P.R.I.M.E. research fellow at the Canadian Centre for German and European Studies at the University of Montreal (Canada). Her research interests include entertainment and the arts, cultural industries, and cultural change within the study of culture and transnational history, focusing particularly on Europe and North America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Dr. Nina Mackert (Leipzig University, Germany)
Nina Mackert ist Historikerin und Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin im interdisziplinären “Leipzig Lab – Global Health”. Ihre Schwerpunkte liegen in der der Nordamerikanischen und Transatlantischen Kultur- und Wissensgeschichte, v.a. in der Geschichte von Körpern, Gesundheit, Essen und Ernährung, in den Critical Ability Studies und der Neuen Kapitalismusgeschichte. Gegenwärtig arbeitet sie an der Fertigstellung ihrer Habilitationsschrift zur US-amerikanischen und transatlantischen Geschichte der Kalorie.