ExtrACTION and Environment TIG

ExtrACTION and Environment Gets Set for Salt Lake City….or your kitchen counter

Jeanne Simonelli. Official TIG scribbler

It’s before the SfAA paper deadline, and we await all the great volunteered papers that will arrive by the extended Sfaa deadline of October 30.  Anticipating this, the ExtrACTION and Environment TIG can already offer you some exciting and information-packed sessions. We don’t know times or days yet, but look for the following:

Anna Willow has organized a session called “Everyday Activism and Alternative Futures.” Papers in this session explore the diverse array of contemporary movements that aim to expedite the crucial transition from the current extractive/exploitative industrial society to the sustainable/just global community of the future. Contributing to the emerging field of Transition Studies, presenters consider participants’ motives for partaking in future creation projects, the personal and political ramifications of their actions, and the broader cultural implications of transition discourse. Spanning geographical and demographic diversity, these papers also take up the essential question of how anthropologists can best study, amplify, and support transition agendas.

Elisabeth Moolinaar continues her multi group roundtable with

Game on! A gamified roundtable on connections, intersections, and collaborations among Extraction & Environment, Risk & Disaster, and PESO. 

Come join us for the third annual multi-TIG and PESO roundtable in which we will explore current highlights, ever-present intersections & connections, and future collaborations, in a gamified roundtable with representatives of each TIG and PESO. The game will be a playful way to provoke highlights from each group at the 2021 meeting and explore new ideas and common threads. The game will lead into a critical consideration of intersections of research (and other work) and its applications for the environment, human rights, and social justice by panelists & attendees. The roundtable will be followed by open discussion and networking.  

Also on the agenda is Experiencing the Precarious Environment 

This panel explores the environmental and socio-cultural impacts of extractivism through a wide range of ethnographic examples. It centers on environments made precarious by natural resource extraction and increasing human occupation. The presentations will grapple with how people make sense of, respond to, negotiate, or resist these multiple challenges. Through these case studies, the panel examines complex interconnections among environmental, social, cultural, and political dimensions of environment protection and natural resource extraction. Moreover, exploring the parallels between fossil fuels, renewables, and water and light enhances our understanding of extractivism/extrACTIVISM and power while helping us identify more environmentally just energy futures. 

The Wolf Paper Prize will be awarded and the winner will speak on the paper A political ecology of jurisdictional REDD+: Investigating social-environmentalism, climate change mitigation, and environmental (in)justice in the Brazilian Amazon - a topic of interest to some of our TIG members.

As Covid levels rise and fall we expect discussion of reconfigured guidelines, reinstated national monuments and much more.  See the next Newsletter issue for the rest of the ExtrACTION and Environment sessions.