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Interdisciplinary Lunchtime Seminar
Title: Material Consequences: Chinese Iron Demand and Steel Supply in the Arctic
Speaker: Dr. Mia Moy Bennett
Date: January 15, 2019
Time: 12:00 noon – 1:00 pm
Venue: Room MH201, May Hall, The University of Hong Kong
Interdisciplinary Lunchtime Seminar
Title: Material Consequences: Chinese Iron Demand and Steel Supply in the Arctic
Speaker: Dr. Mia Moy Bennett
Date: January 15, 2019
Time: 12:00 noon – 1:00 pm
Venue: Room MH201, May Hall, The University of Hong Kong
Title:
Material Consequences: Chinese Iron Demand and Steel Supply in the Arctic
Speaker:
Dr. Mia Moy Bennett (Department of Geography and School of Modern Languages & Cultures, The University of Hong Kong)
Date:
January 15, 2019
Time:
12:00 nn – 1:00 pm
Venue:
Room 201, 2/F, May Hall, The University of Hong Kong (Map)
Language:
English
Enquiry:
(Tel) (852) 3917-5772
(Email) ihss@hku.hk
China’s polar activities are typically explained by academics and state representatives as emerging from national interests in scientific research, natural resources, shipping, climate change, and global governance. Yet few academic or political legitimations of China’s Arctic activities tie them to the country’s metallurgical supply and demand. This paper fills that gap through analysis of the impacts of and responses to China’s rapidly expanding iron and steel industries in the Arctic. Using a global commodity chain framework with emphasis on materiality and relationality, this research considers how the extractive impacts of iron mining and the intensive impacts of the development of steel-based infrastructure are often realized in the same space. The combination of these processes creates a “double frontier” in spaces like the Arctic, which simultaneously serves as an extractive frontier from which raw materials are imported and an intensive frontier to which their value-added outputs are exported. To analyze these processes, this paper explores four vignettes that address first, the spatial expansion of China’s iron and steel sectors, second, the restarting of iron ore production in northern Quebec, third, the Chinese-funded construction of infrastructure across the Arctic, and fourth, the abstraction of the Chinese iron ore industry through environmental and financial measures that improve the position of the country’s cities while exacerbating the socioeconomic and environmental impacts of its metallurgical sectors in peripheral frontiers. Attention to the very substances driving China’s worldwide economic expansion demonstrates how the country’s globe-spanning iron and steel industries are reworking and restructuring social and ecological processes in the north while reproducing the region’s marginalization.
Mia Moy Bennett is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and School of Modern Languages & Cultures (China Studies Programme) at The University of Hong Kong. Through fieldwork and remote sensing, she researches the politics of infrastructure development in frontier spaces, namely the Arctic and areas included within China’s Belt and Road Initiative. She comments frequently on Arctic politics on her blog, Cryopolitics.
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