The Land Torn Asunder: Stories from Copper Country

Oct. 13th at 3:30pm
Dustin Edwards, SDSU
Location: Eastwoods Room (Texas Union 2.102)

Dr. Edwards’s work focuses on digital rhetoric, material infrastructures, and environmental justice; and his talk explores what archival extraction means for regimes of labor, histories of violence, and the colonial Anthropocene. A short Q&A will follow the talk.

Digital archives are also earth archives. Woven throughout our digital devices, platforms, and large-scale infrastructures are the stories of deep conditions where mined materials have been pulled from the depths of earth’s history and extracted through regimes of labor and histories of violence. This talk, drawn from my book project Digital Damage and Rhetorical Invention at the End of Worlds, follows such conditions to the deserts, mountains, and waterways of New Mexico. In particular, after outlining the key terms, assumptions, and methodological priorities of the project, the presentation will offer a bundle of stories about the Chino Copper Mine. Told in a fragmented, interruptive, experimental, and implicative manner, these stories detail the consequences that persist in the wake of the ever-expanding pit. In doing so, these stories not only put pressure on the detached metaphors that populate our digital imaginaries (e.g., “the cloud”), but they also implicate digital rhetoricians by insisting the conditions of our work are grafted into the bigger story of the colonial Anthropocene.