The success of multiple anti-extractivist campaigns in the Americas is probably one of the most underappreciated features of the past 15 years. While the continuous expansion of the extractive frontier remains a major global tendency, a powerful anti-extractivist counter-tendency in the Americas can paralyze mining projects, push for moratoriums on metal mining, mobilize citizens to vote to leave oil underground, and more. The concept of extractivism functions as a symbolic organizing tool that enables interscalar connections among struggles and bridges the former critique of dependency with the climate emergency. It has been so effective that extractivism has become a generic negative critique in the social sciences. This presentation will mobilize critical cultural political economy to reflect on anti-extractivism across different sites, the reactions and adaptations of mining MNCs, and how structural and semiotic dynamics interact within social relationships with extra-human nature. It will discuss the need to better include semiosis in our studies of such conflicts and their impact on the potential of resource nationalism in the near future. It will conclude by opening a discussion on potential post-extractivist futures.

Thomas Chiasson-LeBel is an associate professor at l’Université de l’Ontario Français. His transdisciplinary research aims to understand the diversity of strategies used to influence innovation and development policies and their outcomes in countries with a significant nonrenewable resource extraction sector. He has edited volumes and special issues on Latin America, that mobilized critical cultural political economy to better grasp the semiotic battles waged by economic elites and conglomerates to gain acceptance for their practices, despite opposition from local communities and domestic social movements. He is currently working to link these research interests to the Canadian context, in particular to Ontario, where raw mineral extraction is not only omnipresent but continues to expand.

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