About Us
The Cluster
Since its founding in 2019, the Extractivism and Society Research Cluster has proudly functioned as a non-hierarchical, democratic, collaborative, and gender-equity-affirming entity. Initially, we defined our aim as, “to explore how a critical cultural political economy approach allows us to unravel the nature of socio-environmental and socio-territorial conflicts in the Americas.” From the outset, we claimed that such a perspective could open new ways for grasping the importance of extractivism in the political economy of contemporary Latin America. Since then, we have learned much as the Research Cluster has become a space for intellectual engagement with a broader transdisciplinary perspective. Our current perspective is being continually enriched by Political Economy, Political Ecology, Science and Technology Studies, Critical Race Theory, and other interdisciplinary perspectives, in a quest to better understand extractivism and socio-environmental conflicts in South, Central, and North America.
Since our founding, we have:
- Organized panels at international scholarly conferences (LASA, AAP, CLACSO, SPSA);
- Published co-authored and individual articles in refereed and non-refereed journals;
- Written technical and research reports for universities, local NGOs, and community organizations
- Organized webinars and public events to bring together academics, students, and local community leaders;
- Participated collectively in academic conferences and panels to discuss our findings and engage in fruitful conversations regarding appropriate perspectives to grasp our objects of study
- Studied together different authors and texts;
- Curated a special edition of The Extractive Industries and Society journal;
- Developed syllabi and educational materials on extractivism and the energy transition;
- Compiled shared bibliographies;
- Started to regularly write a blog;
- Prepared funding proposals
- Readied the launching in late 2025 of a Working Papers series to highlight the work carried out by our members and allies.
Extractive industries underlie many of the most pressing social and environmental challenges of our time. Oil, gas, minerals and metals form the backbone of the global economy, technological innovation, and national development strategies. As this sector booms, extractive projects degrade environments, spark local socio-ecological conflicts, and provoke transnational struggles for environmental justice. Socio-environmental conflicts continue growing in number and scope in the Americas. One reason is that transnational corporations and governments are racing to control strategic resources including minerals, land, water, seeds, genetic materials, and knowledge. Another reason is that movements in the Americas have become increasingly successful at blocking specific extractive projects, pushing for moratoriums, forcing national referendums or eliciting mining bans; making anti-extractivist socio-territorial struggle a transnational powerful trend. While the territorial and material dimensions of such struggles are already the object of several studies, their importance for the resignification of capitalism and extractivism in the semiotic struggle that surrounds the most recent crisis remains overlooked and undertheorized. The race to control and increase the extraction of minerals deemed critical for the “green energy transition” intensifies all facets of these crises.
Near and far, at home and abroad, we witness:
- Rising levels of inequality and social precarity as communities are dispossessed of their labor, water, land and livelihoods;
- Wealth and power become concentrated in fewer hands; ,
- Climate catastrophes recur at accelerating rates;
- All forms of media is inundated by green-washing narratives and “technology-moguls-will-save’ us fantasies; and
- Geopolitical conflicts and militarism expand as a US-dominated global system transits to a more multipolar global order.
In such times, we need to hone critical thinking and sharpen analytical tools to defend our communities and transform our world. We aim to make sense of the old and new traits fueling power relations within socio-environmental and socio-territorial conflicts in the Americas.
Objectives
For the 2025-2026 period, the Extractivism and Society Research Cluster are the following:.
- Objective 1: Enhance the conceptualization and application of the transdisciplinary perspective attentive to the interconnected material and semiotic dimensions known as Critical Cultural Political Economy in the study of extractivism in the Americas as well as the entire constellation of associated activities.
- Objective 2: Develop a vibrant network of scholars, scholar/practitioners and socio-territorial defender/activists that is attentive to the innovative strategies being deployed by transnational extractivist capital, state agencies, and local communities and their allies, in Jessica, aquí to focus on socio-environmental conflicts in the Americas.
- Objective 3: Disseminate in compelling and impactful ways the work of the CCPE of Extractivism Research Cluster and its members so that it strengthens popular resistance to extractivism and shapes public policies that place socio-environmental justice at the center.
- Objective 4: Create conditions to launch public facing activities anchored on a critical cultural political economy approach that strengthens capacity building by practitioners of territorially-based resistance to Community-Based Resistance to extractivism.
Structure and Coordination
We currently function based on a Stem/Grape organizational structure . This type of structure aims to connect the collective vision and activities of its members while acknowledging their diverse needs, availability, and funding. seeks to align and facilitate intersections between members’ interests and research projects both geographically and thematically, ensuring a fair distribution of labor among them.
Despite the overarching narratives that see extractivism as inevitable, people all over the world are struggling to put a stop to it and, at the same time, they imagine and work for alternatives. Extractivism is predicated on the ever-expanding encroachment of territories in the broadest sense: air, land, water, underground, and more. We recognize that what capital attempts to commodify is embedded in socio-environmental relations with human and more-than-human communities. Our work aims to accompany and participate in the struggles of community-based resistance and negotiation against extractivism. We learn from and with communities through the experiences of struggle against the predation of extractivism, the structural conditions of inequality, and the imagination and practice of new worlds.
Grape organization structure (current working groups):
We currently function based on a Stem/Grape organizational structure. This type of structure aims to connect the collective vision and activities of its members while acknowledging their diverse needs, availability, and funding. seeks to align and facilitate intersections between members’ interests and research projects both geographically and thematically, ensuring a fair distribution of labor among them.
- Salton Sea
- Extractivism, Rent, and Class
- Mapping the Finance-Extractivism-Energy Transition Nexus
- Pedagogical initiatives: Decarbonation by Dispossession textbook
- Communications and outreach
- Publications
- Academic Networks
The stem:
The metaphor of the stem signifies the unifying thread that links and informs the diverse work of the Research Cluster members. This unifying link is outlined in the objectives stated above. The stem materializes in monthly meetings that have a quarterly coordinator responsible for: a) Coordinating monthly meetings and monitoring general progress, and b) Following up on the notes from each meeting. Note-takers rotate every meeting.