The Poetics and Politics of Extraction and the Environment

The signature project at the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship, this project informs the different inquiries that take place at the Centre. Our focus on extractivism and the environment is deliberate. Today’s global environmental crises and change are connected to humans and environmental exploitation. Resource extraction has shaped African environmentalism in complex and dynamic ways. We know that resource extraction in Africa cannot be decoupled from any study of nature and human ecology; science and the environment; land and de-coloniality; economics and marginality, and broader issues around land, politics, development and infrastructure. Thus, we develop an Environmental Humanities of extraction (EHfE) research approach first, to better grasp the intricate web of African extractive geographies, and second, to embed such complexity in extant and diverse ways of understanding contemporary environmentalism.