BartonMemo6

BartonMemo6: Delineating a Project

This project could be about the environmental disaster that is mountaintop removal mining. It could be about the political corruption that enables companies to circumvent laws that would otherwise greatly restrict the practice. But those stories are being told, and told well, by authors writing for the popular press and by activists through art and new media.

So this project could be about how and why those stories take the shape they do, and what happens to them and because of them once they're told. I like this idea because it lets me think about how knowledge and power move and shift, and it lets me think about people and their individual and collective experiences, histories, and imagined futures. It's about how people situate themselves and their concerns within overlapping and sometimes contradictory cultural spheres. It's about how people think, how they know, how they figure out; it's about how they reach out, and back, and in, and forward; it's about how people try to change their world, and really, what could be more interesting than that?

It could also be about the social, political, economic, and environmental effects of the interplay between the coal industry and opposition groups. That sounds much more academic-y and not half-so much fun, even though it would certainly be part of the first 'about'. But it also might be about some things that don't make it into the stories. But it also wouldn't be about something that gets captured by the stories that I don't know how to articulate. Something like personal experience, I guess. The personhood, the sense of self, that gets completely lost in the depersonalization of categories and generalizations.

It could be about why neoliberalism is doomed to fail. I am not certain about this, but it seems to me that the causes and effects of mountaintop removal mining function serve as a kind of microcosm example of how neoliberalism works with, perhaps, fewer distracting contextualizing factors than examples that are more geographically distributed. There are also, I think, many parallels with criticisms of globalization, but again, on a much reduced scale. National boundaries and 1st world/3rd world designations aren't used (although there are certainly 1st and 3rd world-ish enclaves in many countries), and yet many of the problems are very similar. Again, bit shaky on the background for this, but it's a possibility.