Mining Inequality: AI, Extraction, and Racial Capitalism

5 credits · Undergraduate

From as early as the sixteenth century to the present moment, the history of capitalism has been a central part of our world. It is not just a history of wealth and development, but it is also a history of extraction and exploitation - a history that scholars have conceptualized as racial capitalism. This course explores the global structures of inequality inherent to capitalism and how they have changed over time. We will engage with key scholarly debates and theoretical concepts that have defined our understanding of racial capitalism, spanning from Karl Marx to Cedric Robinson. The remainder of the course will take a close look at various commodities central to the infrastructure of one of the fastest growing and most consequential industries of our time: artificial intelligence. Among the commodities we will examine include copper from Zambia, uranium from Namibia, and cobalt from the Democratic Republic of Congo, among others. Doing so will allow us to trace the material history of racial capitalism across space and time.