PHM-Exch> [phmusa]: After Neoextractivism and the Boom, a working groupcall for participants and paper proposals

[Claudio Schuftan]

From: Anne-Emanuelle Birn <ae.birn at utoronto.ca>



The commodity boom of the early twenty first century reshaped economies,
landscapes, and livelihoods throughout Latin America. Skyrocketing prices
for oil triggered the expansion of unconventional drilling technologies in
new and established locations in Venezuela, Argentina, Ecuador, Colombia,
and Brazil. Governments in Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Peru capitalized
on increasing global demand for food to push the agribusiness frontier ever
deeper into the Amazon. Advances in battery technologies and growing calls
for a post-petroleum ‘energy transition’ lead to speculation and investment
in the ‘Lithium Triangle’ in Chile, Bolivia, and  Argentina. And, these
lists are only a very partial accounting. Unlike earlier moments in Latin
America’s long extractivist history, governments across the region, often
deployed revenues derived from natural resources to support pro-poor
policies, including conditional cash transfers, infrastructure investments,
regional integration, and a return to state-lead schemes for economic and
social development. Variously considered in terms of progressive
extractivism, neoextractivism, and the commodity consensus, the resulting
reordering of the state, society, and nature across the region, explicitly
rejected the neoliberalization of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, while at the
same time emphasizing decolonial ethics and the primacy of social
mobilizations and social movements in politics.

Despite much hope, for often particular internal, regional, and global
reasons, this neoextractivist turn never really lived up to its promises;
after several years sputtering to a standstill in many countries the
progressive extractivist moment in Latin America definitively ended in 2019
with the fall of Evo Morales in Bolivia. Yet, even in places that never
joined the so-called ‘Pink Tide’ of progressive governments, notably
Colombia and Mexico, neoextractivism offered, and continues to offer, a
powerful frame for critically assessing the relationships between nature,
development, democracy, and subjectivity at scales ranging from the
interpersonal to the planetary.

This multidisciplinary working group provides a network to appraise the
histories and legacies of neoextractivism in Latin America and the
Caribbean. Our immediate aims are to organize panels for the 2021 Congress
of the Canadian Association of Latin American and Caribbean Studies (to be
held at the University of Toronto), and to produce a special edition
of the Canadian
Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies.We welcome proposals for
article and presentation, including, but by no means limited to:


   - The political economies of extractivism
   - Ethnographies of extractivism, at all scales.
   - Extractivism and energy transitions in the Americas
   - The Temporalities of Extraction (before and after, mechanical and
   geological)
   - Extractivism and degrowth/postdevelopment perspectives
   - The gendered and engendering effects of extractivism and
   neoextractivism
   - Canada’s role in extractive and neoextractive industries
   - Updates on specific regions, countries, and blocks
   - Notes from the field
   - Extractivism, Indigenous Politics, and Indigeneity
   - Comparative analyses (between states, sectors, or regions)
   - Examinations of extractivism’s literary and cultural production


Submission of a brief title, abstract (150 words), and biography should be
sent to Donald Kingsbury (donald.kingsbury at utoronto.ca) and Daniel Tubb (
dtubb at unb.ca) by October 15, 2020.

First drafts of papers will be due January 30, 2020, leading to a SSHRC
Connection Grant to host a full day workshop at the CALACS 2021 Conference,
either in person or virtually depending on the conditions at the time.
Doctoral students, and emerging and established scholars are encouraged to
submit. Papers should be 8,000, inclusive, and follow the general
guidelines of the Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies.
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