Working Group 9: Extractivism, Recognition, and Responsibility: The Search for More Just Futures

Coordinators:

  • Anna Heikkinen (University of Helsinki) – anna.heikkinen@helsinki.fi
  • Mira Käkönen (Australian National University)
  • Anu Lounela (University of Helsinki)
  • Anja Nygren (University of Helsinki)

In recent years, accelerated resource extraction and its multifaceted environmental-social effects, including greenhouse gas emissions, environmental pollution, constraints to resource access, and drastic alterations in people’s lives, livelihoods, and subjectivities, have received increased attention. A crucial aspect in understanding the harms and losses affected by extractivism is formulation of novel approaches for multi-scalar and multi-temporal analyses of long-term effects of extractivism, their socio-spatial differentiations, and initiatives for transformative responsibility for more just and sustainable futures.

This working group focuses on novel approaches and methods for understanding multifaceted effects of resource extraction, as well as the diverse claims for recognition and responsibility. The panel also analytically explores diverse agendas and initiatives aiming to restore and repair the harms and losses effected.

Format: Three hybrid sessions

Accepted presentations

Session A (Hybrid)
Chair: Anna Heikkinen

  • In the ruins of plurinationality: resistance and re-existence in Imambura, Cotacachi (Riina Bathia, VTT)
  • The water is lost in the sea: Water ontologies and the political agency of water in Central Chile (María Soledad Paz, University of Helsinki)
  • The Extractive Frontiers of Modernity: Resource and Land Ontologies in Sápmi and the Thar Desert (Shayan Shokrgozar; Christine van der Horst; Larry Ibrahim Mohammad; Tor Håkon Inderberg; Siddharth Sareen, Norwegian University of Life Sciences)
  • Repairing Environments: Politics of Responsibility (Anu Lounela, University of Helsinki; Gaffari Rahmadian, University of Heidelberg)

Session B (Hybrid)
Chair: Anja Nygren

  • Developmentalism vs. extractivism. The case of Tanzania (Juhani Koponen, University of Helsinki)
  • Intersectionality as a collective action frame in indigenous youth environmental activism in India (Pragati Parihar, Tampere University)
  • Colonial development in Peäccam: entangled modes of domination (Henrik Peiponen, University of Helsinki)
  • Climate change and extractivist infrastructure at the Northern Sea-Polar Silk Road intersection (Presenter in person in Helsinki: Ksenija Hanacek, ICTA-Autonomous University of Barcelona; Authors: Ksenija Hanacek, Elia Apostolopoulou, Markus Kröger, Sujai
    Banerji, Alexander Dunlop, Arielle Landau, Joan Martinez-Alier)

Session C (Hybrid)
Chair: Anu Lounela

  • Gold Extraction, Ecological Change, and Mining Lifeways in Southwestern Uganda (Eleanor Fisher, Nordic Africa Institute, Sweden)
  • Repairing harm: Desalination in copper mining and claims for responsibility Chile’s Atacama waterscape (Anna Heikkinen, University of Helsinki)
  • Multi-layered oil extractivism: Claims for repair and responsibility (Anja Nygren, University of Helsinki)
  • Radical Ecological Economics: A paradigm from the Global South (David Barkin, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Xochimilco, México)

Registration is now open from 12 January to 15 February 2026. 
The detailed timetable will be published later.