Society for the Study of Affect (SSA)
#MAKE: Methods, Atmospheres, Knowledges, Energies
Vancouver, BC, October 23 to 25, 2026

Abstracts due May 29, 2026
Submit here: https://affectsociety.com/make/conference/?submit=paper&stream_id=10

S16. Insurgent Residues of Extraction

Under extractive conditions, matter is recalcitrant. It volatilizes, leaches, sediments, goes recombinatorial, persists even once discarded. Extraction tries to sort resource from waste, use from remainder. But the residual is charged with movements and timescales of geological life, like how dust murmurates and settles, rust spreads, the way a chemical plume follows water through rocky fissures for decades. These insurgent residues coalesce and thicken around distributions of livability, along infrastructures of settler-colonialism and slow violence, even as they seep, waft, and breach the enclosures through which life and nonlife are organized and theorized—or, worse, sacrificed. They accumulate as tailings, breakdown products, suspended particulate, plastic gyres, but also in concepts: toxic animacies, speculative geologies, and forms of alterlife.

Residues register before they are known, encountered as an off-feeling, a stickiness or fouling, maybe some other diffuse (usually toxic) apprehension. Contact zone before concept, they often stay invisible or unmapped, refusing coherent transit from local to global, micro to macro, oozing through itineraries of indeterminacy. We read grey literature packed with technoscientific jargon, parse massive energy regulator datasets, review cumulative effects studies. There is a feeling-residue to this work, yes. But what would it mean to know the way poisoned soil does? Through a microseismic event caused by fracking or the outflow of acid rock drainage from mining or other earthworks; as fluorescent orange flagging tape or oil and gas flocculants? Residues are naturecultures and medianatures that demand a muckpile of attention. Not tidy extraction. Murky absorption. These are energetic conditions—currents, accretions, reactions, frictions, leakages—that saturate webs of relation, altering capacities to affect and be affected. To follow residues is to enter a ruptured timescape that moves fast and very slow: the reeling volatility of capitalist growth-fantasies held in aquifers and rocky bodies as a long, long monotony of damage and unrest.

This stream invites work that thinks with unruly matters of extraction: volatile, atmospheric, geological, chemical, and compositional forces that move through bio- and geontological registers and orders while fighting back, recomposing, upending damage-centered narratives, and creating new forms of non/life. We ask what attunements and ethics become possible when matter resists extractive capture—materially, compositionally, and in habits of thought:

• Extractive and toxic animacies, racialized or deviant matter, and queer inhumanisms (Chen 2012 Luciano & Chen 2019, Tompkins 2024)
• Economies of abandonment, sacrifice zones, and chemical colonialisms (Povinelli 2011, Nixon 2011, Gómez-Barris 2017, Liboiron 2021)
• The geontological, speculative geology, and geological feelings as forms of insurgence (Povinelli 2016, Luciano 2024, Raffles 2020, Yusoff 2024)
• Alterlife, speculative chemistry, and residues of affect in STS (Murphy 2017)
• Plastic matter, rusting matter, or compost as non-extractive, residual modes of theory-making (Davis 2022, Varga 2026, Arthur & Jentink 2018)
• Life at extremes, deep biospheres, subterranean non/life (eg. Kallmeyer & Wagner 2014)
• Confusions of non/life (eg. plastic-eating fungi or microbes)
• Compositional, speculative, and critical data studies methods for residues (eg. Dumit “Substance as Method” 2021)
• Cumulative regional effects studies and/as temporalities of insurgence
• Indigenous law and jurisdiction, “animisms,” situated knowledges of contamination and more-than-human relation (TallBear 2017, Todd 2017)