In this proposed double session, we invite submissions of papers which explore Madagascar’s many landscapes of extraction. We aim to move away from a damage-centered approach to studying extraction in the Global South, and from normative understandings of extraction centrally focused on circuits of capital and resource exploitation. We instead seek to illuminate Madagascar’s landscapes of extraction through multi-faceted attention to that which is material and immaterial, human and nonhuman, organic and synthetic, local and global, violent and generative. As a group of interdisciplinary scholars, themes explored in this session include:
-The medicalized, reproductive body as a site of extraction
-Transnational and local/regional politics of production and reproduction amid overlapping climate change and public health crises
- Pharmaceutical resources and contestations of health/medicine across scales
- Complexities of knowing, inhabiting, and governing forested, cultivated, or mined landscapes
Adding to these themes, we invite papers across disciplines who broadly explore relations of extraction, materialities, and governmentalities across Madagascar. We wish to especially invite Malagasy scholars and researchers who examine or interrogate these themes in their work.

TITLE: ''IF YOU CAN'T MEASURE IT, YOU CAN'T SEE IT": POLITICS OF FERTILITY AND THE REPRODUCTIVE BODY IN AMBANJA-AMBARO BAYS MANGROVE

Abstract: In 2007, British marine conservation organization Blue Ventures began incorporating family planning into their conservation agenda, in an attempt to fill an unmet need for reproductive health care, empower women to build better futures, and create more sustainable communities. They have since expanded this program into a national Population-Health-Environment Network serving over 300,000 Malagasy women. In this paper, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork in the Ambanja-Ambaro bays mangrove with women participating in this initiative, in order to reveal how normative understandings of reproduction in Madagascar often fail to account for women’s lived experiences of reproduction, and to illuminate deep connections between women’s fertility and environmental desires. I also examine how Madagascar’s renowned environmentalist-led family planning connects Malagasy women’s reproductive lives to local, national and global circuits of demographic knowledge, capital, humans, nonhumans, and things. I wonder: How are Malagasy women’s reproductive lives measured and represented within scientific knowledge, public discourse and policy? How are they connected to landscapes in unexpected ways? What materialities animate the landscape of reproduction in Madagascar (e.g. British conservationists, development agencies, and state demographers; hormones, condoms, plastics, petrol; mangroves, fisheries)? Investigating and challenging normative assumptions, knowledge, and management of Malagasy fertilities, I ultimately take a reproductive rights-based approach to reveal the richness of Malagasy women’s fertility desires, environmental knowledges, and reproductive lives.

Keywords: fertilities, bodies, feminisms