ICS Seminar Series - Extractivism, Community Responses and the Commons

Abstract There’s no shortage of academic, journalistic and popular reports about the violence and negative impact done to the environment and front-line Indigenous and rural communities by extractivist capitalism (the global intensification of mega-mining, oil, gas, mono-agriculture and related transport and communications infrastructure). Nevertheless, fewer scholars are analysing the extra-activist movement, the trans-local network acting to protect collectively held commons across the Americas. Misrepresented by sporadic news, academic and governmental reports, usually sparked by violent protests, groups and their allies are instead making their own media to represent a very different narrative about the past, present and future of their territories.This presentation focuses on current Indigenous and environmental campaigns against pipelines in Canada and the U.S. and the changing composition of movement actors, practices, fields of imagination and trajectories (Lim, 2018)[i]. Drawing from interviews, movement news reports, documentary and music videos, I discuss how the protectors of Standing Rock and Unist’ot’en, among others, are contributing to changes in the political and social imaginary about colonialism, Indigenous sovereignty and governance, violence against women, and the green new deal. Biography Professor Dorothy Kidd has worked in Canada and the U.S. as a media-maker, activist and advocate for alternative and social justice media, including community radio, independent video and news media, and Indigenous communications. She teaches media studies and international studies at the University of San Francisco in California where her research focuses on social and political movement communications. Her current research investigates the communications of the extra-activist movement in the Americas. [i] Lim, M 2018, Roots, routes, and routers: communications and media of contemporary social movements, Journalism & Communication Monographs, vol. 20, no. 2, pp. 92–136.