Andrea Marston

Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey | Rutgers

This article explores the uneven geosocial traces created by transcontinental and corporeal circulations of tin ore, metallic tin, and tin cans from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. Although tin has no essential relationship to human life, I argue that the extraction, circulation, and consumption of tin have nevertheless contributed t...

What happens when the architectures of extraction, once intimately constituted by capitalist and racial forms of exclusion, begin to rot? Focusing on a Bolivian tin mine, this paper examines the social effects of deteriorating “architectures of extraction,” a category that includes both aboveground infrastructures and belowground networks of tunnel...

In this review, we read the interdisciplinary traffic across critical human geography and feminist science and technology studies (FSTS) in light of the insights and destabilizing aporias—in other words, irresolvable contradictions or logical disjunctions—emerging from Black radical and feminist study. We highlight three thematic areas that have re...

Four years after the signing of the 2016 Peace Agreement that ended the longest armed conflict in the history of the Americas, violent struggles over territory continue apace in many parts of rural Colombia. Official and academic explanations for this ongoing violence tend to link the problem to unequal land access, meaning that political solutions...

The special issue Earth Politics: Territory and the Subterranean explores how and to what political and economic effects people have territorialized the underground. Through studies of a range of activities – from scientific exploration to 3-D geological modeling to laboratory analysis to recreational caving – authors in the issue challenge the ide...

This article explores the constitution of subterranean space in a Bolivian tin mine through an analysis of the discursive practices that materialize differentially valued people and differentially valued rocks. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research, I examine the processes through which tin miners are formed as socially stratified subjects...

This paper examines the relationship between resource nationalism, state territorialization, and geological knowledge production in Bolivia. Focusing on two historical moments of post-revolutionary state-building – post-Independence (1825) and post-National Revolution (1952) - I show how the subterranean was produced as vertical state territory not...

Throughout Bolivia, collectives of small-scale miners known as 'mining cooperatives' have developed a reputation for cutthroat extractive practices that were shaped by neoliberal restructuring starting in the 1980s. Charting a history that starts at the turn of the twentieth century, this paper argues that cooperative mining in the tin belt of Nort...

With the ratification of its new constitution in 2009, Bolivia was transformed into a “plurinational state” associated with ecologically oriented values, yet resource extraction has expanded ever since. Fieldwork conducted in communities in highland Bolivia shows how resource extraction sustains and is sustained by “revolutionary narratives” in whi...

This paper examines ways in which regional political, economic, and cultural hegemonies maintain “resource regimes” by exploring the emergence of mining cooperatives as central actors in Bolivia’s extractive economy. Like much of Latin America, Bolivia is experiencing a boom in resource extraction. Unlike other Latin American countries, in which th...

This article reviews the relationship between mining and water governance with an emphasis on Latin America. Focusing on the last decade, it identifies three major shifts in global mineral relations: (1) changes to corporation–community relations, most noticeable in corporate social responsibility projects; (2) changes to state–society relations, w...

This paper introduces the concept of ‘not-quite-neoliberal natures’ in relation to contemporary theoretical debates and Latin American political processes. The phrase is meant to signal both our appreciation of and reservations about theoretical elaborations of neoliberalism, post- neoliberalism, and (post-)neoliberal natures in relation to the wid...

The production of the urban waterscape is an ongoing process. In this paper, I examine the strategies used by members of 'water committees' in peri-urban Cochabamba, Bolivia in their attempts to ensure the long-term integration of their community-run water systems into municipal water plans. My analysis underscores two points. First, the water comm...

Bolivia’s leftward political shift, which is frequently described as “post-neoliberal,” is crucially linked to the ideal of autonomy. While autonomy has a long history among leftist theorists and social movements in Latin America, its contemporary importance is related to an ongoing effort on the part of scholars and activists to identify an altern...

In the last two decades, the fair trade movement has undergone significant institutional changes. From an informal network of activists and producers, it has evolved into a structured set of actors whose collective adherence to “fair” principles is guaranteed by external certification programs. Focusing on the craft sector, this paper explores the...