Extractivism and Society Research Cluster
The Extractivism and Society Research Cluster is hosted by the Dolores Huerta Research Center for the Americas at UCSC. Our research strives is attentive to the material, semiotic, and socio-ecological dimensions of extractivist struggles and energy transition efforts. We are a research collective made up of UCSC and non-UCSC faculty, scholars, and doctoral students.
As we experience system-wide and compounding crises of unforeseen consequences, we acknowledge the need to sharpen our critical thinking skills to better guide our purposeful action.
Our goals
Advance Critical Cultural Political Economy (CCPE): Strengthen the use of a transdisciplinary approach that connects material and symbolic dimensions in the study of extractivism across the Americas.
Foster Networks: Build a dynamic community of scholars, practitioners, and socio-territorial defenders attentive to the strategies of transnational capital, states, and local communities in socio-environmental conflicts.
Amplify Impact: Share research and perspectives in accessible and compelling ways to support popular resistance and influence public policies centered on socio-environmental and energy transition justice.
Public Engagement: Develop initiatives rooted in CCPE that expand capacity for community-based resistance to extractivism and the ushering of more just alternatives
Why “Critical Cultural Political Economy?”
Our research cluster aims to deploy an expanded cultural political economy approach to understand socio-territorial conflicts in the Americas. We draw from Sum and Jessop (2013) work and infuse it with the intellectual traditions from Latin American critical thought to analyze sites of extraction and reimagine paths towards a more socio-ecologically sustainable and just world. We share the understanding that:
- Capitalism’s inherently contradictory and unstable character makes it prone to crises in which new imaginaries, ideas, and rationalities, are constantly being produced in efforts to restore hegemony and establish arrangements that contribute towards capital reproduction on a more or less manageable manner
- One core contradictions of capitalism is that it does not reproduce itself on the basis of the commodity form alone, and thus, it constantly seeks to redraw the boundaries between the commodified and non- commodified realms, incorporating new realms of the “ world of life” under the aegis of capital in an attempt to overcome its own contradictions;
- Social reality is co-constituted by material and semiotic practices. Although studies can focus on different aspects of social reality, these should not obliviate the constant co-determination of both dimensions.
- We aim to recouple the fields of political economy, cultural studies, and critical political ecology in our work.
- In other words, CCPE means paying attention to the cultural dimension of the material struggle and the material dimension of the cultural struggle.
We seek to improve the understanding of the political economy of extractivism and the green energy transition, the power relations involved, and the socio- environmental struggles it generates by using these insights. Identifying the intra-related political economies, ideologies, and ecologies that underlie the extractive sector and the struggles it generates is fundamental for understanding and posing alternatives to extractive development in contemporary Latin America.