Extractivism digs into and draws from earth and its communities. In recent years, a broader understanding of extractive relations has emerged, one that includes but is not limited to the wresting of minerals from mines. The concept has come to address extraction’s intertwinement with questions of environment, labor, the state, capital, and community–especially Indigenous community–life. Our research cluster seeks to draw transregional and transtemporal connections between theorists, activists, artists, and social movements grappling with and organizing against new and old forms of natural resource exploitation, colonial plunder, and statist developmentalism. Likewise, the cluster aims to trace how extractive practices and resistance to said practices are thought within growing and popular discourses on materiality and the global production, consumption, and circulation of commodities.
A Research Lab at the University of Michigan
