Last things first, Liliana Doganova rounded off the conference with her brilliant keynote lecture titled "Discounting the future: The ascendancy of a political technology", based on her book about presicely "discounting" coming out early next year.
Together with Value threads members Stine Engen and Kristin Asdal, Doganova also organized a panel on "Risk, finance, procedures of financialization and the new worth of the green" which aimed to investigate the new political role of finance in governing climate change and its accompanying methods of valuing nature and so-called "climate risks". Engen presented a paper on how climate risk is being dealt with in the EU carbon market, trying to tease out what it could mean to say that a market is being financialized. In her paper, Asdal made the argument that there is something new going on in contemporary valuations of nature, traced specifically in the Norwegian public reports called NOUs, where financial actors are bringing in a new economy.
Marie Stilling organized and co-chaired a panel on "Care studies and after – experimenting with materials, methods, and sites". Here, she also presented a paper on the emerging Norwegian seaweed cultivation industry and its ambitions of creating an environmentally good economy. Through her study she asks if seaweed cultivation can be analysed as a way of caring for economy and environment?
Nassima Abdelghafour also presented her work at the conference in the panel on "soil repair" . Her paper, co-written with Liliana Doganova and Brice Laurent (CSI, École des mines), built on their fieldwork carried out in French Guiana during several research visits from 2019 to 2021, which you can read more about here. The paper asks the questions of whether and how it is possible to reconstitute pre-mining environments as the mining industry is being urged to implement post-mining rehabilitation and revegetalization. What exactly is to be regrown or restored?