Extractivism Power

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

Everything we own, use, eat, manipulate, or create from is - at least to some extend - made off stuff, of material matter that necessarily comes from somewhere. To make things with things, materials had to be moved from one place to another. Elements had to be removed, carved out, dug up, pumped to the surface, broken down, mined, extracted, collected to become resource. Then, processes of mixing, melting, refining, condensing, filtering, purifying, and accumulating followed in order to manipulate and create properties that would make the stuff that people would need. Our cities, for example, are dense archives of extraction; think of bricks, steel, cement, plaster, pipes, cables, glass, asphalt, circuitry. Behind each material lies a chain of geological processes, labor regimes, technological systems, as well as – often – political struggles. In this course, we investigate together what turns things into resources? This course particularly invites students from IPOL, CULP and STIA to explore practices and infrastructures that turn land, matter, and even human bodies into extractable value. Moving across mines, plantations, laboratories, ports, pipelines, and financial networks, we trace the flows of goods, technologies, capital, and people that sustain contemporary economies and our everyday life. Soon, we will notice that extraction is not only an economic process but rather a political one. It organizes race, labor, territory, and life itself. Drawing on political ecology, critical geography, STS, urban theory, and postcolonial theory, we explore how extractivism is entangled with: • questions of labor, race and colonial histories • environmental destruction and the climate crisis • struggles over sovereignty, infrastructure, and planetary futures From fossil fuels to lithium, from plantations to data infrastructures, we consider how extractive systems are shaped, imagined and how they can be challenged. The course engages with contemporary struggles over resources situating them within longer histories of colonialism and emerging debates about the Capitalocene and planetary transformation.