Environments and Epistemologies of Extractivism
This seminar will examine relations of extraction and extractivism in the global history of settler colonialism and racial capitalism. We will focus on how the dispossession of Indigenous homelands and the exploitation of racialized communities—the extraction of territories and resources—intersect with the expropriation of ways of knowing and being on these lands and in these communities. We will engage scholarship on environmental justice and environmental racism, while paying close attention to the limits of these frameworks across a global context. We will put these studies in conversation with scholarship on the theory and practice of archival research, including recent efforts to develop protocols for protecting Indigenous and other forms of community knowledge. With this scholarly work, we will engage histories of resource and knowledge extraction through a wide range of media, including literature, film, art, and other narrative texts. Through this media, we will consider how authors, artists, and producers represent racialized, gendered environments of extractivism and the uneven exposure to risk and harm that these environments produce. Our readings will explore how this media imagines and expresses life amidst extractivism—past, present, and future.
This seminar covers the origins of conservation and environmentalist movements related to communities most vulnerable to economies of extraction. We will discuss the complex politics of resistance to and engagements with racial capitalist enterprises. Parallel to our academic study, we will examine the long history of Indigenous material culture appropriation by settler institutions, as well as data sovereignty movements to protect these cultures. The seminar’s attention to research practice and protocol aims to get us to think critically about how we imagine knowledge production in our research processes across the humanities and social sciences, especially as we engage Black, Indigenous, and peoples of color community contexts.