Confirmed Keynote Speakers: 

Benj Gerdes (Institute for Futures Studies, Stockholm) and Charmaine Chua (University California Berkley)

In the rush to fulfil the twinned promises of green and digital transition, state actors across the globe are rapidly mobilising and expanding extractive infrastructures to procure and secure the flow of rare earth elements and critical minerals. Demand for cobalt and lithium alone is anticipated to increase by upwards of ninety per cent by 2050 in the European Union, while for some materials like aluminium, copper, and gallium these numbers range from two- to five-hundred increases. As indicated in the EU Critical Raw Materials Act (CRM, 2023) the geographies nominated to source European industry with its raw material include a range of indigenous and post-colonial communities, as well as precarious ecologies from as far as the Arctic and the Pacific island nations. In this way, the supply chains of “transition” are propositions about a particular form of life and a particular set of values (and beneficiaries) normalized by that way of life. What a supply chain is amongst other things is an ongoing proposition about how the world ought to be built, how matter ought to move through it, and to whom value is supposed to accumulate. The contested territories, laboring bodies and fragile ecologies that will be marshalled in the name of sustainable development and European prosperity requires a new framework of conflict not currently captured by the limited scope of current Conflict Mineral Regulation policy. Responding to this conjunctural moment, this symposium positions the dynamics of supply chain expansion and resistance as coordinates for critical inquiry and invite attendees to consider the following questions: What are the forms of critical evaluation and contestation emerging to challenge the neocolonial prospectus of this emergent phase of supply chain capitalism? Where in the propositional map of supply can we ground solidarity and share capacity? What methods of inquiry and counter-logistics work best across sites of extraction, processing, assembly, and delivery and what critical traditions prove relevant for apprehending and challenging the incipient forms of dispossession and violent coercion helping to expedite these critical raw cartographies? 

This symposium invites contributions from researchers and practitioners interested in skillshares on supply chain criticism and in extending the resources we bring collectively to the communities in which we seek to nourish solidarities. Moving beyond the safety of diagnostic criticism, this symposium insists that we consider the propositional norms embedded in actually existing and emerging supply chains, and deliberate together over the norms by which we might instead seek to provision the matter of social reproduction. 

Unique in this international symposium is its three-fold criteria for participants to 1) name what (and how) they want to teach other people about a specific critical raw material(s) specified in the CRM (skills, methods, approaches, archives, vernacular knowledges), 2) listing what they want or need to learn, in order to 3) support a partnership (proposed or established) with a specific community drawn into contested relation with the critical cartography of supply chain capitalism.

To this end we are seeking contributors from across a wide range of disciplinary fields who are willing and able to share their expertise of a particular logistical space, milieu or infrastructure to a diverse critical audience composed of scholars, creative practitioners and activists. Papers should be grounded in a logistical site on the European continent, and follow a named critical material(s) from the CRM that is connected invariably to other sites of extraction, distribution and storage across the world. Contributions should be sensitive to the range of ecological and political intensities that accrue across the length of the nominated chain, noting points of contestation, contradiction and conflict that occur in the course of that material’s sourcing and circulation. 

Possible topics of interest:

Archives of Resistance and Counter-Logistical Memory

• Historical and contemporary accounts of militant and organised resistance against supply chains, including counter-logistical tactics deployed by communities in struggle (e.g. Mapuche resistance; Niger Delta/Shell conflict; targeted shipping and arms manufacturers supplying the genocidal state).
• Fugitive memory and counter-forensic approaches to slow/state violence including environmental injury, dispossession and enforced disappearance.
• Gleaning as method: farming, feeding, and regenerative practice as forms of counter-logistical knowledge and community archive.
• Inheritance, patrimony, and extractive metalepsis — what is passed down, what is hollowed out, and through what logistical forms does dispossession reproduce itself across generations.

Sense-Making at the Logistical Threshold

• Smell, atmosphere, and the embodied milieu of logistical opacity — field methodologies that move beyond representation toward site-specific and sensory inquiry.
• The visual rhetoric of supply chain self-representation: feedstocks, raw materials, and extraction in corporate and state imagery.
• Geofetishism and metallurgical desire: artistic and research practices that contest the spectacularisation of shiny materialities and rare earth aesthetics.
• Critical analysis of AI-generated imagery as a meta-visuality of supply chain capitalism — the synthetic aesthetics of immediacy, abundance and the nutrient base of AI image slop.

Countering the Gaps in Attention

•  Methods for mapping and developing counter-cartographies of logistical connectivity across flashpoints and sites of conflict that existing frameworks fail to link (e.g. the empirical and cartographic gap between lithium conflict and battery conflict as researchable objects).
• New concepts and critical vocabularies for bridging disconnected nodes of struggle within single commodities or supply pathways (e.g. solidarities between mining and port communities).
• Labour as a contested site and the question of what counts as a commodity; approaches to slow violence that exceed event-based analysis.
• Anticipatory and speculative methods for apprehending supply chain harm before it fully materialises.
• Developing shared vocabularies — movement indexes, lexicons of the logistical littoral — for researchers and communities working across linked sites of struggle.

Propositions Between Dispossession and Social Reproduction 

• Historicity of dispossession and its relationship to labour migration, environmental displacement, and agricultural production.
• What other supply chains become visible when “critical” is expanded to include the materials, labor and infrastructures of social reproduction?
• Alternatives to supply chain violence beyond resistance and boycott: collective struggle, community sovereignty, reconfiguration, and the gap between the imaginary and the reality of a supply chain.
• Thick description, price manipulation, and the theatricality of market making as forms of logistical power.
• Traditions of black and indigenous ecologies and fugitive infrastructures.
• Marxist feminist critiques of social reproduction (e.g. carrying, bearing, care-work, mutual aid). 

Abandonment, Stranding, and Infrastructural Afterlife

• Stranded ecologies and communities left in the wake of resource extraction and logistical disinvestment.
• Sacrifice zones of carceral infrastructure and experimentation.
• Energy supply chains oscillating between raw earth and fossil fuel production; the politics and temporalities of infrastructural abandonment.
• Organising in the logistical non-space: counter-power at the last mile and across disaggregated labour forms.
• Forms of labour and culture at sea.

The Computational Supply Chain

• Supply chains of immaterial and digital labour — data, platform work, and the logistics of the intangible
• Latent space, data access, and the sensorial containment imposed by logistical infrastructures on communities at extraction and processing sites
• AI-generated imagery and synthetic visual culture as both product and concealment of extractive supply chains

Critical Legal Approaches to Conflict and Sovereignty 

• Legal critiques of settler colonial and European law
• Maritime shipping as a legal-economic territory 
• Extrastate zones, conflict customs, and the political economy of “duty” 
• Legal lessons from the non-aligned and anti-colonial movements 
• Contemporary efforts to increase conflict minerals mediation in the EU 
• Mutiny

Please send title and abstract with max 300 words addressing the criteria above and an additional short bio by August 3, 2026 to supplychaincriticism@proton.me. Collaborative, creative, and alternative formats are welcome. Specify if you are proposing a 15 minute contribution, round table, screening, or other format. Participants will be responsible for their own travel and accommodation but efforts will be made to facilitate reduced options for graduate students and ECRs in need. Selected contributors will be invited to develop their projects for an edited collection more specifically working with the Conflict Minerals Regulation Framework as a strategic and creative point of departure. 

Supply Chain Criticism International Symposium is supported by the Netherland Institute for Cultural Analysis (NICA), the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), the Environmental Humanities Center Amsterdam, and the University of Glasgow’s Infrastructure Humanities Group (IHG).