Karen Rignall (University of Kentucky), “Extraction as an agrarian question: Copper mining, solar energy, and collective land tenure in the Moroccan periphery” (Agrarian Studies Colloquium)

Event time: 
Friday, October 7, 2022 - 11:00am
Location: 
Zoom and 230 Prospect Street, Room 101 See map
Event description: 
Karen Rignall is a cultural anthropologist and associate professor at the University of Kentucky specializing in issues of resource access and control in North Africa and the central Appalachian region of the US. Her research examines the agrarian change and the politics of land access, rurality, and natural resource governance in Morocco’s pre-Saharan oases. She has conducted ethnographic fieldwork and multi-disciplinary collaborations informed by economics, political ecology, and critical energy studies. Her most recent publication is An Elusive Common: Land, Politics, and Agrarian Rurality in a Moroccan Oasis, on land conflict, agrarian change, and the politics of the commons with Cornell University Press. Dr. Rignall’s current project is an engaged research initiative comparing the social and political dynamics of copper mining and utility-scale solar energy in Morocco. Her work on energy and economic transition in the Appalachian US also focuses on the intersection between the legacy of extraction and renewable energy, supporting grassroots networks rooted in rural communities and their visions for vibrant, egalitarian futures.
 
Agrarian Studies Program:
The core of the Agrarian Studies Program’s activities is a weekly colloquium organized around an annual theme. Invited specialists send papers in advance that are the focus of an organized discussion by the faculty and graduate students associated with the colloquium. This topic embraces, inter alia, the study of mutual perceptions between countryside and city, and patterns of cultural and material exchange, extraction, migration, credit, legal systems, and political order that link them. It also includes an understanding of how different societies conceive of the spatial order they exhibit. What terms are meaningful and how are they related?: e.g., frontier, wilderness, arable, countryside, city, town, agriculture, commerce, “hills,” lowlands, maritime districts, inland. How have these meanings changed historically and what symbolic and material weight do they bear?
 
Meetings are Fridays, 11am -1pm Eastern Time, unless otherwise noted.
 
Meetings will be held in a hybrid format, both on Zoom and in-person at 230 Prospect Street, Room 101.
 
Please contact agrarian.studies@yale.edu to receive the meeting information and the password to download the paper from the Agrarian Studies website.
Admission: 
Free but register in advance
Open to: 
Yale Community Only