Therese Keogh

Narrating Materialities of Excess

Therese’s research brings together a series of fragmented narratives that trace formations of slag and clinker, material excesses of extraction. Disrupting the ideal image of mining as unidirectional, slag and clinker offer grounds for rethinking material excesses and economies of mining through a practical analysis of what is leftover. Here, the leftover subscribes to alternative genealogies of temporal-material configuration, and the narrative formations these configurations make possible. Slag provides a pivot away from causality embedded in economies of extraction, toward a margin of excess, exuberance and experiment that reorientates both geologic temporalities and normative academic writing. Together, clinker and slag provide a reorientation away from causality embedded in economies of extraction, toward a margin of excess, exuberance and experiment that reorientates both geologic temporalities and normative academic writing. This research adopts narrative writing as both another form of material excess generated by extraction, as well as a method for rethinking materialities of excess through practices of writing.

Supervisors: Alex Martinis Roe (DPM, VCA), Hélène Frichot (ABP, UniMelb), Kathryn Yusoff (Geography, QMUL)

Research Areas

extraction, narrative, materiality, excess, writing practice, speculation

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