EXTRACTIVE MEDIA: AESTHETICS & INFRASTRUCTURES OF DEPLETION
Project Co-Directors: Zeynep Çelik Alexander, Debashree Mukherjee, and Brian Larkin
Project Coordinator: Hannah Pivo
Questions of resource extraction are now front and center in almost every academic discipline across the humanities and social sciences. Propelled by the urgency of planetary climate crisis, scholars are reinventing their core research questions to ask how we came to this pass, and also where do we go from here? The Extractive Media working group seeks to take this conversation beyond fossil fuels to track the ways in which energy economies span continents and oceans, differentially affect unequal bodies and lives, and bleed across disparate sites such as the coal mine and the computer screen. We begin with the question of how media forms (print, architecture, photography, cinema, or, more recently, computational media) have historically contributed to material and imaginative modes of extraction, and, further, how we might turn to these very forms to find new possibilities for equitable futures?
This project is supported by the Center for the Study of Social Difference, the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, and SOF/Heyman.
EVENTS
UPCOMING
March 10, 2025, 6:30pm [New time] Timothy Mitchell, “Extractivism: From Where Does Extraction Extract?"
April 24, 10am-5pm Camera South Asia III
PAST
February 24, 2025 James H. Smith, “The Eyes of the World: How and Why Diggers Resist the Media-Facilitated Purification of the Coltan Supply Chain in the Eastern Congo”
February 3, 2025 Ralph Ghoche, "Resurrecting the Quarries of Rome: Algerian Onyx and the Revival of Material Polychromy"
December 13 & 14, 2024 Extractive Media Conference
November 11, 2024 Extractive Media Seminar
September 19, 2024 Vertical Integration: An artist talk with CAMP (Mumbai)
April 27, 2024 Camera South Asia II
April 24, 2024 Stephanie O'Rourke, "John Martin: How to Scale a Volcano"
March 4, 2024 Eleanor Johnson & Jonah Rowen
January 25, 2024 Brian R. Jacobson, "Extractive Time"
November 15, 2023 Macarena Gómez-Barris, "Elemental Thinking and the Representation of Extraction"
October 26, 2023 Jo Guldi, "The Dangerous Art of Text Mining"
October 11, 2023 Reinhold Martin, "The Remediation of Oil: Use-Value or Utility?"
April 27, 2023 Camera South Asia: A Symposium on Cinema and Photography
PUBLICATIONS
See below a list of recent publications by working group members: