CRoLAC Thematic Workshop

Extractive Economies/Insurgent Ecologies: The Contested Politics of Sustainability in Latin America and the Caribbean

The past two decades of Latin America’s left-turn – now largely displaced and/or radically diluted – offer sober lessons on the strategic obstacles facing radical social forces who seek to rebuild a world fit for living. The ‘Pink Tide’ era was blessed with exceptionally ripe conditions for progressive politics: almost-complete regional unity against US imperialism, a commodity super-cycle fuelling social programmes, and a (re)surgent subalternity forging national domestic compacts and transnational movement-building. Despite this, countless unresolved contradictions – political, economic and ecological – radically fused around a spiral of incongruent claims and strategic setbacks. Underpinning these tensions was the fundamentally contested nature of resources themselves: Are natural resources the key to national liberation, or merely the shovel that digs deeper mines amid deadlier consequences? Is small-scale agroecology (food sovereignty) capable of feeding highly urbanised societies? And can the promise of emancipation ever be fulfilled in the shadow of capital’s endless thirst for labour and nature?

Taking inspiration from the recent volume, Insurgent Ecologies, by the Undisciplined Environments Collective (2024), this one-day workshop aims to bring together scholars and activists from across disciplinary and organisational boundaries in order to think through the current environmental challenges and socio-ecological struggles across Latin America and the Caribbean. From deforestation and soil erosion, to water depletion and resource extractivism, the multiple socio-ecological crises that scar the landscape of Latin American politics prompts and urgent need ‘to look beyond’ – beyond the dominant paradigms, discourses, practices and institutions that reproduce the death-drive of capital accumulation. As a means of looking beyond, this workshop brings to light the multiple, intersecting and often contradictory forms of insurgent ecologies across Latin America and the Caribbean as pre-figurative networks of resistance and repair.

10:45

Welcome, and opening introductions from organisers

11:00 – 12:30

Land and Freedom: Agro-extractivism in/against Peasant Ecologies

12:30-13:30

Lunch

13:30 – 15:00

Blood of the Earth: Life, Death, and Resistance on the Mining Frontier

15:15 – 16:45

Legal Extractivism: Light and Shadow Across Juridico-Economic Regimes

17:00-18:30

Keynote (In Conversation)

18:30

Reception