Abstract
Commodity Frontiers aims to provide robust and freely accessible content on the past, present, and future of commodity frontiers, from diverse perspectives and positionalities. We strive for “real-time†reports and reflections on contemporary issues and events, as well as contributions that link the past and present of capitalism and the countryside, providing longer historical viewpoints on problems that are often assumed to be modern. The Journal comprises two themed issues per year, one in the Fall and one in Spring. Each issue includes articles and contributions presented in 11 regularly recurring sections, and every section has its own editorial team. The theme of this, our first issue, is Mineral Frontiers. As Leonardo Marques states in his contribution, “From smartphones to so-called green technologies, including Elon ‘We will coup whoever we want’ Musk’s electric cars, the production of many contemporary commodities continues to depend on the extraction of various raw materials from different parts of the world†(this issue, p. 48). Indeed, although we seem to be living in ever-more virtual worlds, with physical distances mediated through digital platforms and devices, our lives are very much embedded in material worlds of objects, “resources†including minerals, and uneven social and ecological relations. A focus on commodity frontiers grounds us not only in these “things,†but also in the shared and divergent histories and historical entanglements and conjunctures that produce and reproduce them.