Seminar: "The Social-Ecology of the Formation of Mosul Oil Extraction Frontier and the Value Theory of Nature", by Dr Zehra Yasin

Dr. Zehra YAŞIN, researcher at the Social Sciences University of Ankara, Turkey, will be at ICTA-UAB to give a seminar.

Title: "The Social-Ecology of the Formation of Mosul Oil Extraction Frontier and the Value Theory of Nature"

Speaker: Dr. Zehra YAŞIN, researcher at the Social Sciences University of Ankara, Turkey
 

Date: Wednesday November 2nd 2022
Time: 15-16.30h. 
Venue: Sala Antoni Rosell (Z/022 - Z/023) ICTA-UAB
 

This seminar explores the formation of Mosul oil extraction frontier as one of earlier instances based in colonial and semi-colonial interventions and geopolitical transformations in the form of extension of the nation-state rule outside Europe from a socio-ecological lens. From the value theory of nature lens, it mainly argues that the integration of Mosul oil into the world-historical capital/nature relation recreated Mosul and its ecology as an oil extraction frontier that indicates both a socio-ecological shift from an agro-pastoral regional economy and social-ecology to the social-ecology of oil. The substantive nature of nation-state rule in relation to geography and social-ecology of extraction was defined by the oil concessions, which signified both a value regime based on capital-nature relation and a socio-metabolic regime organizing, configuring and protecting distinct flows in the cycle of extraction, processing and transport of crude oil. The social-ecology oil prefigured by the oil concessions indicated dissolution of agro-pastorally based rural-urban linkages, urban expansion on the axes of oil fields and oil industry and ruralization of agro-pastoralism. This was a distinct form of local-regional metabolic rift produced by the formation of capital-nature relation. The realization of Mosul oil in the capitalist world market throughout the 20th century, based on such socio-ecological transformation, in turn, became one of the central sources of the eventual entropic dissipation of energy or carbon, i.e. the biospheric rift which gained more visibility and urgency in the 21st century in the form of climate crisis.

Bio
Zehra Taşdemir Yaşın is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Department of Sociology in Social Sciences University of Ankara. She received her PhD in Sociology from the State University of New York at Binghamton. She has also worked as a Development Specialist in Ankara Regional Development Agency with a focus on rural development, rural-urban integration, small peasant agriculture, urban farming, and permaculture. Her research covers the historical formation of the Mosul oil frontier and the socio-ecology of oil, the environmental movements in Turkey, global socio-ecological/agro-ecological transformation, global extractivism, the global environmental justice movement, and the relationship between nation-state formation and capitalist development in the oil-producing Middle East. She published in the Journal of Historical Sociology and the Journal of Peasant Studies. Her work titled ‘Contextualizing the Rise of Environmental Movements in Turkey: Two Instances of Anti-Gold Mining Resistance’ appeared in the book titled Transforming Socio – Natures in Turkey: Landscapes, State and Environmental Movements published by Routledge. Her last work was published by the Journal of Peasant Studies, titled “The environmentalization of the agrarian question and the agrarianization of the climate justice movement”. Her work with a title of “The socio-ecological question, the global environmental justice movement and antisystemic environmentalism” is forthcoming at a special issue of Perspectives on Global Development and Technology (Brill Publishers, 2023). She is currently working on two book proposals, tentatively titled as “The socio-ecological question and antisystemic environmentalism” and “The Social-Ecology of Oil: The Production of an Extractive Frontier in Mosul, 1900-1958”.

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