»Poetics and Politics of Sand«

Interdisciplinary workshop 9–10 February 2023

The huge consumption of sand and its fundamental role in society have only recently gained attention. Numerous journalistic (Beiser 2018) and scientific accounts warn of the »looming tragedy of the sand commons« (Torres et al. 2017); environmental concerns related to dredging and mining (Bendixen et al. 2019; Larson 2018) such as pollution, biodiversity degradation and soil disturbance, as well as illicit practices associated with the trading of sand (Global Witness 2010). Most of this research presuppo­ses sand’s function as a resource and treats its shortage as an economic problem. Accordingly, suggestions to solve the issue encompass better governance of sand on the local and international level, finding substitutes for construction materials, or designating alternative mining sites where sand is considered abundant. While it is critical to reduce the harmful effects related to the extraction and trading of sand, treating sand as only a resource obscures the social and historical processes by which it is uneart­hed, transformed, measured, transported and applied to the built environ­ment. The interdisciplinary workshop Politics and Poetics of Sand brought together participants from geogra­phy, geology, social science, humanities, arts and design to share work-in-progress research on »geosocial formations« (Clark and Yusoff 2017) of sand.