Cultural studies of extraction

ABSTRACT

The special double issue at hand offers Cultural Studies engagements with extractivism and the myriad of conflicts, struggles and other processes and phenomena that have risen together with the on-going intensification and expansion of extractivist industries and exploitation. In this article, we examine the political and epistemological stakes of these engagements, and introduce the different perspectives from which the notions of extractivism and extraction are approached within this issue. We argue that as a conceptual framework loaded with political meaning and potential, and able to address the on-going moment of dwindling resources, environmental degradation and heightened social and economic inequality, extractivism and studies of extraction are crucial for the discipline’s efforts to engage contemporary culture politically, and to examine on-going processes of exploitation and subjectification through specific context and cases. Many of the articles included in this issue expand understandings of extraction, and present a broad range of methods and analytical frameworks through which different forms of ‘extractivism’ and its consequences might be examined, deciphered and discussed within Cultural Studies. And yet, what emerges out of these efforts eventually, is the ultimate centrality of the war between climate and capital for contemporary politics of globalization.

KEYWORDS:

• Buen vivir
• climate
• energy
• exploitation
• extractivism
• Indigenous struggles

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Laura Junka-Aikio is a postdoctoral researcher at the Giellagas Institute for Sámi Studies, University of Oulu, Finland. Her research has focused upon the problematics of decolonization, politics of knowledge and subalternity in the context of the colonial present experienced in Palestine, and the struggles of the Indigenous Sámi in Northern Scandinavia. She is the author of Late Modern Palestine: The subject and representation of the second intifada (Routledge, 2016).

Catalina Cortes-Severino is an assistant professor at the Department of Anthropology, Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Working through the mediums of academic writing and the arts, her research concerns the questions of memory, history of the present, image-time, everydayness, ethnography, affects and processes of subjectification.