Following Law Off the Pages: Extractive Frontiers across Pipelines and Forests by Luca Tenreira and Gildelen Aty-Biyo

Both Gildelen and Luca's research projects, grounded in extractivist contexts, expose the fragility of law's founding fictions and call for modes of inquiry that can begin from the sites where these fictions unravel. Their engagement with the theme of mobility entails a methodological and conceptual shift: rather than starting from legal categories, they begin with forms of life, landscapes, and controversies that are often designated as outside the law. This starting point allows them to suspend classificatory reflexes and take seriously what unfolds beyond law's frames. Doing law otherwise in this context entails facing the entangled nature of their fieldwork contexts. This talk seeks to explore what brings together an inquiry into transborder forest governance amidst logging and mining in the Congo Basin, and the ethnography of the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (ECOP). The exploration of disruptive mobilities in this context reveals a framework grounded in three moves: anchoring,…