Lively Commodities, Nonhuman Labour, Encounter Value

<strong>Centre for the Study of Social Systems School of Social Sciences</strong> <strong>CSSS Colloquium</strong> <strong>Dr. Maan Barua</strong> (School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford) a paper on <strong>Lively Commodities, Nonhuman Labour, Encounter Value</strong> Date: <strong>28 January 2016</strong> <strong>Abstract: </strong>Rendering nonhuman life for sale is a fundamental facet of contemporary capitalism. Political economy extensively examines how nature is commodified, but fails to analyze the difference liveliness of animals makes to processes of commodification. Drawing upon empirical work on lions and elephants in the political economies of tourism and biodiversity conservation in India, this talk proposes analytics for understanding commodification and accumulation in relational and less humanist terms. First, it develops Donna Haraway's concepts of 'lively commodities' and 'encounter value', foregrounding animal ecologies to rework political economic categories of the commodity, labour and production in more-than-human terms. Second, it examines how lively commodities and encounter value configure political economies, mapping their specificities and economic potential. The talk advances potential diagnostics and vocabularies through which ecology and non-dualist accounts of agency might be integrated into the nature-as-resources approach of political economy. <strong>Bio Data: </strong>Maan Barua is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Geography and the Environment. His research is focused on generating new understandings of the politics, spatialities and governance of the living and material world, engaging political ecology and posthumanist thought. Of particular interest are nonhuman ecologies and processes pertaining to production, landscape and knowledge, and situations in which different ecological epistemologies are brought into conflict. Maan's past and ongoing research projects include work on animals' geographies, nonhuman labour and the economy, and most recently postcolonial urban ecologies. Maan has a DPhil in Geography from the University of Oxford, and is an Early Career Fellow of Somerville College.