Content uploaded by Farhana Sultana
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Farhana Sultana on Mar 28, 2020
Content may be subject to copyright.
Article
Nature and Space
Extraction, entanglements,
and (im)materialities:
Reflections on the methods
and methodologies of natural
resource industries fieldwork
Organizing Editors
Adrienne Johnson
University of San Francisco, USA
Anna Zalik
York University, Canada
Contributors
Sharlene Mollett
University of Toronto, Canada
Farhana Sultana
Syracuse University, USA
Elizabeth Havice
University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill, USA
Tracey Osborne
University of California, Merced, USA
Gabriela Valdivia
University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill, USA
Flora Lu
University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
Emily Billo
Goucher College, USA
Corresponding author:
Adrienne Johnson, Environmental Studies Program, University of San Francisco, 2130 Fulton Street, San Francisco,
CA 94117, USA.
Email: ajohnson21@usfca.edu
EPE: Nature and Space
0(0) 1–46
!The Author(s) 2020
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/2514848620907470
journals.sagepub.com/home/ene
Abstract
This multi-authored collection of papers examines the complex realities of research on natural
resource industries, including the messy entanglements of extraction, materiality, and everyday
social life this research entails. Of central importance to the contributors is how scholars con-
front fieldwork challenges ethically, methodologically, and corporeally. The collection has two key
objectives. First, it expands our understanding of extractive industry by bringing together work
on resources conventionally understood as extractive (e.g. oil and minerals) alongside resource-
intensive industries not typically examined through an extractive lens, for instance fisheries,
agricultural monocultures, water, and tourism. As such, it considers the historical and current
conditions that facilitate the extraction of resources in parallel, cyclical, and reproducing forms.
Second, the collection examines scholarly positionalities, methodologies, and dilemmas that arise
when studying nature-intensive industries, including the extractive dimensions associated with
social research itself. Together, the pieces argue that research concerning extractive industries
entails multiple scholarly positions—positions problematically inflected with colonialism and
always shaped by power relations. Contributors to the section draw largely from feminist,
postcolonial, anti-racist, and historical materialist insights to frame and problematize the corpo-
real and representational concerns arising from their scholarship on nature-intensive industries,
including personal dilemmas that they have encountered in their work. Overall, the collection is
driven by the realization that research, and the analyses it entails, may serve as a tool for
emancipatory intervention yet also reproduce inequality. The futures of the people and ecosys-
tems at the center of our studies impel constant reflection so that our work, and that of the next
generation of scholars, may offer critical analysis that contributes to transforming—rather than
reinforcing—oppressive relations associated with extractive sectors and industries.
Keywords
Extraction, feminist political ecology, research methods and methodologies, engagement
Introduction to special section
Scholars studying the industries of oil, gas, agriculture, and other ecologically intensive
sectors have written a host of inspiring analyses concerning the geographies of extraction.
This work has examined the modes of exploitation and social relations surrounding the
removal, production, and distribution of resources, as well as resistance against these activ-
ities enacted by communities both near and at a distance from extractive sites (Ahlers and
Zwarteveen, 2009; Anthias, 2018; Bebbington et al., 2013; Bridge, 2009; Curley, 2020; Eaton
and Kinchy, 2016; Himley, 2013; Huber, 2013; Kama, 2019; Kenney-Lazar, 2012; Lu et al.,
2016; Mingorr
ıa, 2018; Valdivia, 2008). While such scholarship, including that by the
authors included in this collection, has provided crucial analyses concerning the extraction
and exportation of nature by state and non-state actors, this section is animated by the view
that as researchers we must constantly reflect upon the fieldwork we undertake concerning
contentious industrial processes (and the sites in which these processes occur). Crucially, we
need to amplify and foster critical interrogation of the methodological realities and ethical
dilemmas specific to studying extractive, nature-intensive industries in the field. We aim to
examine the uneven power relations that facilitate both the extraction of resources and the
appropriation of community knowledge—the latter at times the result of the researcher’s
involvement. As such, this special section has two key objectives. First, we seek to critically
2EPE: Nature and Space 0(0)
reflect upon and expand our understanding of extractive industry to encompass non-
conventional nature-intensive and nature-exporting activities. In turn, the varied material-
ities of these industries necessarily shape our methodological choices and fieldwork experi-
ences. Second, we reflect upon our scholarly positionalities and methodologies when
studying nature-intensive industries, including the extractive dimensions associated with
the practice of social research itself.
The contributions in this collection are informed in various ways by critical feminist,
critical race, and decolonial lenses (see Billo and Hiemstra, 2013; Daigle and Ram
ırez, 2019;
Katz, 1994; Kobayashi, 1994; Mollett and Faria, 2013; Moss, 2002; Mullings, 1999; Smith,
2013 [1999]; Sultana, 2007; Sundberg, 2003,2014), which call for close attention to questions
of positionality and researcher standpoint in the field, including a problematization of “the
field” itself. Foundational to this collection are insights from feminist political ecology
(FPE), which examines the multi-scalar ways in which gender, race, and class shape strug-
gles of access over environmental resources (Harris, 2009; Hawkins et al., 2011; Nightingale,
2006; Rocheleau et al., 1996). FPE is concerned with how intersectional identity markers
and other axes of power articulate through environmental formations (Mollett and Faria,
2013; Nightingale, 2011), and the forms in which colonial legacies and capitalist relations of
nature shape environmental power dynamics, including highly gendered and racialized out-
comes (Hawkins et al., 2011; Sundberg, 2004).
In studying the logics and contradictions of environmental resource projects, many fem-
inist political ecologists employ a relational approach to research where positionality and
privilege are forefronted along with dilemmas, emotions, and ethical problems in the field.
(Pulido, 2002; Sultana, 2007; Sundberg, 2003). While we draw significantly from the work of
present-day feminist geographers, the contemporary literature associated with FPE in the
contemporary Northern academy was preceded and shaped by feminist literature of the
global South (e.g. Mohanty, 1991, 1997; Spivak, 1999) and anti-racist feminism (e.g. Davis,
1981). Furthermore, FPE is informed by anti-colonial insights coming from well beyond
geography circles, such as feminist critical development studies (e.g. Kothari, 2002,2006;
Smith, 1989), and we recognize that scholarship motivated by attention to intersectionality
(Crenshaw, 1989), the sexual division of labor (Mies, 1986), and decolonizing methodologies
(Smith, 2013 [1999]) is essential to understanding the power relations embedded in sites of
extraction. Too often, these intellectual debts have not been adequately acknowledged
within the FPE literature.
Due to the often contentious and highly charged nature of social conflict in extractive
sites, our multi-authored collection argues that field research concerning extractive indus-
tries requires an approach attuned to the multiple positionings of scholars. These posi-
tions—given the frequent distance between the work and residence of scholars and the
field—are frequently inflected with colonial resonances and always shaped by classed,
raced, and gendered power relations. Our varied, individual locations, captured in our
divergent scholarly accounts, enable and/or constrain researcher access and alliance build-
ing. In some cases, this may result in close interactions with resource owners or controllers
(i.e. State agencies or firms), or with communities opposed to, or experiencing the negative
socio-ecological effects arising from, the extraction of highly valued materials in their midst.
Together, the contributions in the section complicate scholarship on extractive industries by
bringing attention to the uneven and sometimes oppressive relationships that shape the
work of academics (despite commitments to employing liberal or anti-oppressive
approaches). The collective insights offered by contributors acknowledge that research in
extractive sites requires sensitivity to the power relations shaping access to the field, and a
Johnson et al. 3
recognition that we should continually address the implications of these power relations
through scholarly, collective reflection.
This introduction and the subsequent set of contributions are each organized in two parts.
Section one begins with the contributions by Mollett, Sultana, Havice, and Johnson who
study industries that have been less typically examined through the lens of extraction—res-
idential tourism, water use, fisheries, palm oil—but which nonetheless entail intensive extrac-
tion, exportation from, and/or enclosure of, nature at sites and human settlements where they
are located. The immediately subsequent piece, by Osborne, offers a bridge to the second
section in that it examines efforts, from a scholar-activist standpoint, to promote climate
justice in areas threatened by hydrocarbon extraction. The second sub-section contains pieces
by authors Valdivia and Lu, Billo, and Zalik. These discuss fieldwork on industries that are
frequently understood as extractive—oil, mining, and gas—with particular attention to their
own positionality and/or the power relations shaping their access to field.
We organize this introduction in a form that reflects these two sub-sections and mirrors
the section’s key objectives. First, we discuss our broader conceptualization of extraction
beyond minerals and hydrocarbons; second, we turn to questions of positionality and rep-
resentation in the field. Below, we proceed with our discussion of the section’s contributions,
beginning with the extension of the conception of extraction to additional resource-intensive
industries, which is then followed with a discussion, informed by the methodologies of FPE,
concerning researcher positionality and engagements in the field.
Conceptualizing extraction
The sites and industries discussed by the contributors share certain key material and his-
torical attributes: (i) resource-intensivity in the extractive process and (ii) literal or meta-
phorical exportation of nature and transfer of metabolism via sedimented relations which
have unfolded through histories of colonialism and imperialism. Extraction involves an
assemblage of physical and social processes that facilitate the removal of more-than-
human nature, transforming it into marketable resources that produce nature as commod-
ity. Following recent scholarship that seeks to expand conceptualizations of extraction and
extractivism (Gago and Mezzadra, 2017; Killoran-McKibbin and Zalik, 2016), we under-
stand extraction to extend beyond physical harvesting processes to include sedimented
oppressive power relations and logics (local but also global) which explicitly and/or implic-
itly maintain and secure the exploitative arrangements under which nature is appropriated,
altered, or removed over time.
Each of the industries discussed here has specific materialities, associated with and driv-
ing socio-spatial and physical infrastructures that have shifted over the course of their
human/technological histories. But these materialities are very much historically constitut-
ed. Indeed, globally, and in the sites discussed in the contributions in this special section, the
use and relocation of more-than-human resources have co-existed with one another in
decidedly cyclical and reproducing forms. Water, oil palm, and hydrocarbons have been
both prerequisite to build infrastructure and/or have propelled extraction and production of
other resources and water is extensively used and polluted in mineral extraction. The rela-
tions that constituted hydrocarbons as extractive resources also produce contemporary
economies and geographies of tourism, and are clearly the drivers of climate change.
Accordingly, rather than “cases” of extraction we understand the research and reflections
offered by our colleagues in this section to reveal varied world-historical and world-
ecological transformations associated with colonization, racialization, class formation,
and gender hierarchies. In addition, these industries have been fomented through the
4EPE: Nature and Space 0(0)
work of particular corporations, with national, regional, and/or global roots in specific
fractions of capital (Girvan, 2017 [1976]). Yet despite the parallel consequences that
shape a range of large-scale, nature-intensive and nature-exporting industries, they have
quite distinct material dimensions. The varied materialities, for instance, of different min-
erals, hydrocarbons, and “natural resources” such as forests or water—let alone large-scale
tourism or mobile fisheries—in turn have significant bearing on our methodological options
and choices in the field.
Various contributions herein examine social relations attendant to the removal and com-
modification of resources typically understood as “extracted” in part due to their relative
non-renewability from the perspective of geological time scale—notably minerals and
hydrocarbons (see Osborne, Valdivia and Lu, Billo, Zalik). But crucially Sultana underlines
that water is the extracted resource with the longest history and most pervasive influence;
this is notable in the role of water in shaping social reproduction and constituting agricul-
tural civilizations and imperialist developments over the longue-dur
ee of world history.
Considering extraction as a global historical process, Mollett’s contribution is particularly
provocative in its attention to the dynamics undergirding residential tourism. The “coastal
spatial ontology” of the Bocas region of Panama helps elucidate how historical relations of
colonialism, crucially tied to the transatlantic slave trade and pillaging of land, resources,
and sexual exploitation, were fundamentally extractive (Galeano, 1997; Rodney, 2018
[1972]). Mollett demonstrates that, as historically crucial components in an unfolding set
of social relations, contemporary residential tourism complexes cannot be understood apart
from the fundamentally extractive relations shaping Bocas’ present, including the racializa-
tion and sexual violence with which it was mutually constituted.
Contributors Havice and Johnson theorize extracted resources that may be understood as
“renewable”—palm plantations and fisheries—but whose contemporary manifestations in
capitalist production and global commodity chains have clear ecological consequences. They
involve spatial transfers of metabolism, including the provision of industrial gear, to harness
mobile resources such as fish; they are also dependent on the availability of human labor and
capital and offer a nuanced understanding of the ways in which extractive relations and
productive relations are co-constitutive in the lives of workers, in this case fishers and small-
holders. Osborne’s piece centers upon climate change and its contemporary manifestation,
the result of various centuries of hydrocarbon dependent industrialization, sometimes
referred to as “fossil capitalism,” and the crucial work currently undertaken by activists
and critical scholars to confront its contemporary dangerous legacy. Hydrocarbons, howev-
er, were preceded by and made possible as a result of the yoking of timber and water as
energy sources in global markets (Bunker and Ciccantell, 2005), with forests central to
Osborne’s (2011, 2015) scholarship as well. Thus, we argue, a broader “ontology of extrac-
tion” that draws from the insights of generations of critical and Marxist historians is prefig-
ured by both intensive use of the more-than-human environment—through the harnessing of
successive global energy forms; the sedimentation of gender, racial, and class hierarchies
(Amadiume, 1987; Federici, 2004); and spatial transfers of nature (Braudel, 1992 [1979];
Bunker and Ciccantell, 2005; Frank, 1967; Mies, 1986; Moore, 2003).
Entanglements, engagements, and extraction
Many of the authors touch on the methodological difficulties of studying extractive, nature-
intensive industries and the associated entanglements of social relations, emotional encoun-
ters, and lived realities; these simultaneously shape how research communities carve out
their livelihoods and how researchers choose to engage (or not) with industry-involved
Johnson et al. 5
actors (see Mollett, Sultana Osborne, Billo). For example, contributors Valdivia and Lu
present us with the term, “uncomfortable witnessings” to describe how they negotiate and
deal with their unease concerning how some of their research participants negotiate daily
livelihoods in the context of extractive industry, while also being aware of the privileges that
may propel them to cast judgement. They find it important to “witness and listen” in order
to lend support to the communities they research. Johnson experiences “uncomfortable
witnessing” from another vantage point in working alongside “oppositional” corporate
actors, or research participants whose expressed political perspectives run counter to
those of the researchers’. Navigating political difference using critical reflexive research
techniques has helped reinforce Johnson’s (2017) view of corporate plantation
expansion as a main driver of land conflicts, yet has shifted her interpretation of the role
of smallholders in the transmission of palm plant diseases. Both Valdivia and Lu and
Johnson’s experiences underscore the complicated lived realities of researchers studying
extractive industries in the field, including their negotiation of positionality and personal
viewpoints.
Other authors in this collection address the entanglements of historical processes and
materiality and examine how current extractive relations are not new but rather express
processes and social arrangements crystallized under earlier rounds of formal colonization.
This finding has implications for research methods and approach. For example, Mollett
relies on historical excavations and enduring problematic narratives—with sexist and racist
overtones—to assess the current degrading conditions under which Panamanian women’s
employment has been naturalized. She observes that job opportunities as domestic workers
available to women, alongside their separation from land, are outcomes of contemporary
colonial influences linked to tourism-related land purchases by Northern, white foreigners.
Havice’s research examines the geoeconomic relations involved in the global tuna fishery
and how countries in the global North have influenced the fishing industry to their benefit by
excluding Pacific claims on returns, a relationship dating back to formal colonialism. The
mobile materiality of tuna as resource has also shaped her methodology—orienting her
toward studying the sector as a regional/global industry, rather than at particular sites.
Thus, she has adopted methods that enable and require movement in and out of sites,
entailing fieldwork in numerous countries (Havice, 2013).
In addition to history and materiality, contributors throughout this special section dem-
onstrate how researchers’ intersectional identit(ies) shape their engagements in the field and
the specific form their research interventions may assume in sites of extraction. Such self-
reflexivity is less apparent in studies of resource governance that do not adopt a feminist
stance—whether in sociology, anthropology, or geography. For Sultana her embodied,
affective approach to the extraction of water in Bangladesh foregrounds critical reflexivity.
This has helped her navigate the juxtapositions of her insider–outsider identity, one char-
acterized by commonalities with those whose circumstances she studies, in terms of gender,
race, nationality, and religion, while also inflected with class difference. Sultana’s contribu-
tion also reminds us that research in extractive sectors requires physical access: one’s phys-
ical body and abilities facilitate or restrict the kind of data that may be collected. Billo too
discusses her affective feminist identity but in relation to the extractive politics of oil in
Ecuador. Her identity as a critical feminist scholar in fact triggered the state to dismiss her
research intentions; consequently and ironically, this dismissal ultimately strengthened her
solidarities with communities and resistance to state power. Zalik’s piece touches on racial
and geographical privilege and discusses how her whiteness and “Northerness” offered her
protection from violence surrounding the oil industry in divergent research sites, including
Nigeria. These contributions and others leave us with unresolved yet productive insights
6EPE: Nature and Space 0(0)
into the complexities involved in building solidarities with those who live in the midst of
extractive industries.
Conclusion
The messy reality of studying nature-intensive industries—including the forms through which
scholars encounter and challenge these industries ethically, methodologically, and corpore-
ally—is a long-standing preoccupation for many of the authors in this special section (as
evidenced by the previous contributions some have made to the fields of FPE and critical
resource geography). This section is the outcome of an interdisciplinary collaborative work-
shop held at York University in December 2017 where we shared and discussed our experi-
ences conducting field research involving large-scale, nature-intensive extractive industries.
Collectively, the contributors herein were of the view that joint reflection, and a focused effort
to confront the lived realities of fieldwork, is continuously and persistently necessary. But
perhaps unsurprisingly, putting our accounts to paper and naming our personal experiences
and sentiments in the field was less straightforward. The discomfort we faced in writing
ourselves into our narratives is reflective of an overall uneasiness that many political ecolo-
gists have in sharing personal experiences in scholarly journals. Given the critical and reflexive
demands of the feminist and anti-colonial scholarship that informs our work, this uneasiness
is a salient feature of our positionality. Based on our discussions and the insights offered by
our colleagues in this section, we call for continual, collective efforts to reflect upon, rethink,
and recalibrate how fieldwork is carried out in spaces impacted by large-scale resource extrac-
tion. We are driven by the realization that research can act both as a tool for emancipatory
intervention but also continued inequality, where researchers’ careers are advanced, yet com-
munities continue to experience deteriorating living conditions. The futures of the people and
ecosystems at the center of our studies make this reflection imperative so that our own work,
and that of the next generation of scholars, may offer critical analysis that contributes to
transforming, rather than reinforcing, oppressive relations arising from extraction.
Adrienne Johnson
University of San Francisco, USA
Anna Zalik
York University, Canada
Tourism as extraction: Unearthing coastal
ontologies in the Panamanian Caribbean
Sharlene Mollett
University of Toronto, Canada
Everyone says that I could work for a gringo ...that I can be a maid. But that means dirty work.
And not just when I work as a maid ...even when I worked as a personal assistant for an artist
Johnson et al. 7
from Florida ...she wanted me to clean up the mierda from the dog’s ass. It was humiliating.
(Melanie, Interview, Old Bank Bastimentos Island, 2012)
The Bocas del Toro archipelago is located on the western Caribbean coast of Panama. This
cluster of islands is homeland to indigenous
1
Ng€
abe peoples who share the coast with
multiple generations of Afro-Antilleans since the late1800s (Bourgois, 1989). In the 1990s,
Bocas emerges as a priority site for tourism development, which relies upon a persistent flow
of affluent migrants from mostly Europe and North America. Foreign nationals or “expats”
own a growing share of land in Bocas made possible through a variety of permanent and
semi-permanent tourism related land investments facilitated by Panamanian law. Such a
process is referred to as residential tourism (Mollett fieldnotes, 2011; Thampy, 2013; Van
Noorloos, 2013). The Panamanian state promises foreign investors a secure land market and
offers assurances to domestic residents that these investments will direct employment and
financial benefits their way (Mollett fieldnotes, 2012; Guerr
on Montero, 2014). Yet, while
many local people desire work in tourism, promises of employment remain largely unful-
filled (Guerr
on Montero, 2014; Mollett, 2017). In Bocas, Ng€
abe and Afro-Antillean discon-
tent and widespread cynicism over the lack of dignified employment and precarious job
contracts intensify with mounting land tenure insecurities, growing social inequality, and an
atmosphere of everyday challenges to local people’s lands, waterways, and cultural practices
(Guerrero-Montero, 2015; Thampy, 2013).
However, contemporary social tensions have a past. Indeed, the injustices embedded in
21st century residential tourism development are constitutive of the longue duree of foreign
land settlement on the Panamanian Caribbean coast. As Schein (2011) writes,
we are to an extent freed from the dangers of presentism and charges of teleological story telling
when we acknowledge historical geographic legacies as part of the contemporary landscape
palimpsest rather than involving the past as inevitable precursor to present concerns about
land and life. (15)
Such “buried epistemologies” are unearthed through historical inquiry and reveal the ways,
in the case of Bocas, Ng€
abe and Afro-Antillean women become naturalized as maids,
particularly through place specific racial and gendered logics and narratives imbued in the
coast’s colonial spatial formations, both then and now (Stoler, 2016; Willems-Braun, 1997).
In this paper, I reflect on how history is important to my methodological approach to
understanding land and livelihood struggles in the context of residential tourism develop-
ment on the Panamanian Caribbean Coast. In so doing, I draw insights from postcolonial
feminist historian Ann Stoler (2016) and the concept of recursion. “Recursive analytics”
illuminate how histories are marked by more than rupture and continuity and rather are
informed by “processes of partial reinscriptions, modified displacements, and amplified
recuperations” (Stoler, 2016: 27). Attention to an enduring “colonial presence” in Bocas
del Toro acknowledges that even when the colonial forms and actors are dissimilar to the
past, the “tactics of instantiating difference” and identifying an “internal enemy” have
contemporary colonial resonances (Salda~
na-Portillo, 2016; Stoler, 2016). Thus in this article,
I make visible how such resonances are entwined in the racial and patriarchal logics that
operate, at once, as mutually constituted constellations and multi-temporal relations on the
coast of Panama. The temporality and spatiality of racial and gendered power shape people,
place, and work in such a way that the past, present, and future are co-constitutive of
residential tourism development. Such messy temporalities are methodologically salient
and contribute significantly to the tracing of spatially relevant histories of racial and
8EPE: Nature and Space 0(0)
gendered injustice and, as such, help carve a path toward just, embodied and emancipatory
political ecologies (see also Sultana, this collection) in Bocas.
Sedimented racial and gendered histories are part of the fabric of everyday life in Bocas.
While conducting ethnographic fieldwork, Ng€
abe and Afro-Antillean participants “knew”
that I was not a local. In contrast, affluent migrants, mostly Canadians and Americans,
often expressed shock and surprise that I was not Panamanian. As an African-Canadian
woman, many questioned whether I was in fact Canadian, and explained their doubts by the
assumption that “dark skinned tourists are rare in the islands” (Mollett fieldnotes, 2011).
Through prior research experiences in Central America, I am now accustomed to my body
opening dialogue about race and gender in the field (Faria and Mollett, 2016). However, the
repetitive use of the words “nigger” and “indian” by European and North American
“expatriates” in reference to Afro-Antillean and Ng€
abe residents astonished me. The explic-
itly racist and sexist narratives (along with implicit ones) employed by expatriates to explain
local peoples’ poverty, Ng€
abe and Afro-Antillean women’s sexuality, and the “false” land
complaints and denuncias filed against them by local people were ubiquitous in expatriate
spaces. The way this lexicon freely circulated was summarized by Manuel, a Panamanian,
US-trained doctor who insists that “with gringos comes Jim Crow, we’ve seen this before.”
In addition to a set of racially differentiated gender narratives about Ng€
abe and Afro-
Antillean women, Bocas is a place where the colonial fantasies of expatriates swirl without
the worry of “the political correctness police” in countries of origin (Mollett fieldnotes,
2011; Mollett, 2017).
Manuel’s reflection refers to the early 1900s when many Afro-Antillean and Ng€
abe
people labored for the United Fruit Company. For much of this period, social life was
shaped by Jim Crow policies instituted by the UFC’s American executives who lived in
“white zones” (Mollett, 2017). The comment is instructive. Reading the continuities and
discontinuities of foreign land control over time unearths how a set of assumptions about
domestic populations accompany Euro-American land ownership. Such racial and gendered
spatial imaginaries afford different degrees of rule over certain kinds of bodies, and simul-
taneously fasten particular kinds of work to the domain of specific kinds of people (see Billo,
Havice, Johnson, Sultana, this collection). To illustrate, I offer a brief background to con-
temporary land conflicts in the archipelago. In particular, I show how placing history in
conversation with ethnographic testimony helps complicate the discursive naturalization of
black women as “maids.”
2
Finally, I reflect on how residential tourism is extraction. This is
not simply a symbolic claim, but such a notion is material. Latin American development
builds upon a Euro-American historical-extractivist thirst to control land and peoples, often
in racialized and carnal ways. This enduring logic of extraction is embedded in the making
of residential tourism space in Bocas.
Entanglements: Land displacement and domestic service in Bocas
In 1994, the Panamanian government passed Law 8, the Tourism Law (Gaceta Nacional de
Panama, 1994). Since then, successive governments have introduced additional neoliberal
legal mechanisms to facilitate foreign investment in tourism related land development.
According to both state and private investment representatives, foreign land sales generate
a “robust” and “speculative” coastal land market, which bolster the economy through the
construction of luxury homes, hotels, and leisure spaces, such as Red Frog Beach Island
Resort and Spa (Mollett fieldnotes, 2011). The loss of historical relations to land and cus-
tomary forms of land control for local Ng€
abe and Afro-Antillean people intensify with the
resort’s ongoing expansion (Guerr
on Montero, 2014; Mollett, 2017; Thampy, 2013).
Johnson et al. 9
For Afro-Antillean women, limited employment opportunities outside domestic service
reflect an enduring colonial stereotype that continues to shape black women’s subjectivity as
“inextricable from brute labor,” sexually dangerous, and less-than-human (Morgan, 2004:
12). Within Latin American scholarly history, the hypervisibility of black women in domes-
tic service is partially explained as a remnant of colonial slavery (De Santana Pinho, 2015;
Goldstein, 2003; Wade, 2013). The repetitive way black women serve as “criadas” (maids) in
the homes and businesses of elites and mestizo families embodies a collective geographic
imaginary that assumes certain kinds of labor tasks such as “cleaning” and “cooking” are
meant to be done by certain kinds of bodies. In the words of Brazilian scholar Jose Lins do
Rego (1932/1966), “[t]he custom of seeing every day these people in their degradation habit-
uated me to their wretchedness” (cited in De Santana Pinho, 2015: 103; Perry, 2013). Such
alignments between blackness and wretchedness are pervasive in Bocas as evidenced by the
opening quotation from Melanie (above), and dismissed by “expats” with a shrug of the
shoulders and mumbles of “This is Bocas,” as if their complicity in this colonial racial
landscape is neither of their choosing nor to their benefit (author’s fieldnotes, 2011,
2012). Afro-Antillean women actively contest such presuppositions. And while “grateful”
for “some” employment in local tourism related businesses, they repeatedly lament about
the lack of jobs outside of domestic service (i.e. housekeeping, laundry services, nannying,
and cooking) (author’s fieldnotes, 2011, 2012). These contestations question expatriate land
control in Bocas and leave me to ponder if “This is Bocas,” real or imagined, how is this so?
As a spatial formation, residential tourism reflects the longue duree of the coasts onto-
logical becoming. Through archival data collection at the Archivo General de las Indias
(General Archive of the Indies, thereafter Archive), in Seville, Spain, stories of settler
travel to the Americas populate the archive (see Zalik in this collection for another archival
encounter). Because Seville was “a town that became, as a result of the opening of the New
World, the most famous and important city in Spain” (Pike, 1967), it was a key city from
where settlers and free and unfree servants and laborers sought permission to travel to the
Americas from the Crown and their representatives in the Casa de Contratacion. Settlers
needed licencias to travel with people and property, of whom many took African descended
slaves, who were in high numbers in Seville in the 16th century (Pike, 1967). The examina-
tion of protocolos and licencias in both the Archivo and the Archivo provincial de Andaluc
ıa
(Provincial Archive of Andaluc
ıa) read alongside Latin American/Spanish American histor-
iographies (1492–1700s) affirms that free and unfree people of African descent were integral
to Spanish settlement in the Americas (Ireton, 2017; Wheat, 2016). Negros ymulatos trav-
elled as criados. According to historian Chloe Ireton, the term criado included all kinds of
contractual (male and female) labor arrangements employed in royal travel license applica-
tions (Ireton, 2017). In addition, crossing the Atlantic as a slave could secure freedom for
unfree criados willing to assist “owners” in the voyage; and for free blacks, a criado contract
meant escaping precarious poverty, a condition that did not change with emancipation
(Pike, 1967).
The multiple forms of emancipatory freedom and autonomy among negro and mulato
criados in early Spanish America complicate colonial spatial imaginaries linking blackness
and “wretchedness” in the “afterlife” of slavery (Hartman, 2016; Ireton, 2017; Mollett, in
preparartion). Contemporaneously, these histories are absent from state and elite imagina-
tions and concomitant labor arrangements reflecting a particular temporal reading of slav-
ery that closes off other imaginations and spaces of freedom within master–slave relations,
ignoring Bocas’ historical-geographical realities. Indeed, historian Herman Bennett prob-
lematizes the way that the emblem of plantation “slavery invokes images of structural
continuity and cultural stasis” in a way that reinforces North American expatriate
10 EPE: Nature and Space 0(0)
imaginaries that tend to limit black women’s futures and their place in domestic service
(author’s fieldnotes, 2012; Bennett, 2007). Such a spatial notion as “This is Bocas” emerges
from a particular reading of the past that enshrines foreign white control over land and people,
as a “natural” and the “only” way of being.
Final thoughts: Tourism as extraction
Residential tourism in Bocas is constitutive of a coastal spatial ontology that relies on Euro-
American appropriation and the extraction of indigenous and Afro-descendant lands and
people. Caribbean place making in 21st century Panama shares logics of power that extend
from 16th century encounters sanctioned by Spain’s quest for wealth pursued through
extraction (Galeano, 1997). These wealth expeditions did not only dispossess indigenous
peoples from their land in the Americas, but forced them to work on these lands (i.e.
encomiendas) producing food and services under a violent system of tribute on behalf of
elites and royal officials. Furthermore, extractive practices of conquest in the Americas also
include the pillage of African lands and indigenous Africans through forced migration as
part of the transatlantic slave trade. Dehumanized in the imaginaries of settlers and explor-
ers, indigenous Africans were forced to endure the violence of slavery through a variety of
racist, carnal, and gendered practices in the name of Euro-American wealth creation and
civilization (Kelley, 2017). These geographies of indigenous and black slavery and land
dispossession are part of the coast’s ontologies in Panama. As such, tourism development
unfolds in this violent colonial past present, making (residential) tourism an extractive
industry. Like the “sacrificial zones of ‘progressive’ extraction in Andean Latin America”
(Valdivia, 2015: 246), residential tourism in Bocas reflects sedimented histories of land and
labor that link past and present in material and symbolic ways. Mapping such active space
making by weaving ethnography with historical inquiry unearths the enduring saliency of
colonial violence AND the imagined possibilities of more just forms of inclusion for Ng€
abe
and Afro-Panamanian peoples and their lands in the context of residential tourism devel-
opment on the Panamanian coast.
Embodied emotionalities of field research
Farhana Sultana
Syracuse University, USA
My work on environment and development issues generally engages in intersectional FPE
but employs more specifically the framework of emotional political ecology, where emo-
tions, embodiments, politics, power relations, spatiality, and ecological change are imbri-
cated simultaneously (Sultana, 2011, 2015). My approach in carrying out field research is
informed not only through academic training and experience in ethnographic research, but
also my trajectory as a researcher of and from the global South, as well as my research
experience on the most contested resource on earth: water. Water is the oldest extractive
resource as both surface and groundwater have historically provided the world’s drinking
and irrigation water as well as been essential for industrial production. This means that
Johnson et al. 11
water is not just an extractive resource for the market, but central to the reproduction of
households and human bodies, and thus part of gendered reproductive labor. Water is the
very stuff of life itself and this makes water the most critical natural resource, as it is a
biologically necessary and non-substitutable entity, while being vital for all other human
activities. There is thus competing demands for water everywhere. Commodification, diver-
sion, and misuse of water have exacerbated the ongoing dispossession of nearly a billion
people from having access to safe clean water daily (Sultana and Loftus, 2012). Water’s role
in human society is simultaneously cross-scalar, historical, political, and intersectionally
gendered/classed/racialized. Researching drinking water crises and injustices necessitates
field research with communities suffering from a lack of water and facing concomitant
crises. My politics is thus aligned with those who lack access to this basic right and my
ethnographic fieldwork with marginalized communities also involves working with various
powerful actors in water governance and policies (such as the state, non-government organ-
izations, international donors, and various water providers).
In this essay, I detail how attention to embodied emotionalities contributes to existing
feminist scholarship on fieldwork. While there is a growing scholarship on the emotional
embodiments of the field (e.g. Davies and Spencer, 2010; Ellingson, 2017; Moss, 2005;
Nairn, 1999; Sundberg, 2005), there is still less attention to this in contexts of contentious
or controversial resource extraction. Such contexts are often marked by colonial violence,
subjugation, international power brokers, formidable players, and scalar injustices. Thus,
carrying out fieldwork that integrates ethics, empathy, and embodied emotionalities of the
fieldwork process can take on particular meanings, bringing forth different kinds of dilem-
mas and offering opportunities for more nuanced research engagements and insights. In
thinking through embodied emotionalities, I follow Ahmed (2004) in asking what emotions
do instead of asking about emotions per se. Emotions are always embodied, social, contex-
tual, and relational (Ahmed, 2004). The sociality of emotions is important in feminist field
research, and definitely when dealing with something as critically important as drinking
water among vulnerable populations: because water insecurity plays a critical role in daily
instances of illness, health, distress, flourishing, or death (see also Sultana, 2011; Wutich and
Ragsdale, 2008). Furthermore, I am also informed by research on bodily geographies, how
embodied subjectivities are negotiated over time and place, and how bodies are read/marked
differently (e.g. Longhurst et al., 2008; Moss, 2005).
The emotional embodiments of the research process are ever-present, existing before,
during, or after fieldwork. In grappling with the embodied emotionalities of field research
on water injustices and water contamination, I have had to confront issues that are visceral,
political, personal, and embodied, as well as address challenges and limitations that arise
across these. The materiality of water and its centrality to daily life shapes the emotional
geographies of fieldwork. Being critically reflexive in engaging with marginalized commu-
nities where I am simultaneously insider–outsider (cf. Mullings, 1999) and occupy spaces of
betweenness (Mohammad, 2001; Nast, 1994), and on an issue such as the daily need of
drinking water, requires humility and empathy throughout the research process, being fun-
damentally conscious and conscientious about one’s questions, engagements, relationships,
and power structures, as well as being open to novel ways of knowing and being in the
world. I believe it is imperative that all scholars venturing to the global South be trained on
research ethics and feminist, postcolonial, and decolonial methodologies to account for the
ways embodied subjectivities, historical power relations, global geopolitics, and reflexivity
are fundamental to meaningful and careful research. My work is informed and shaped by
feminist scholars who have argued for critical reflexivity about their research practices,
interventions, disruptions, and impacts (e.g. England, 1994; Katz, 1994; Kobayashi, 1994;
12 EPE: Nature and Space 0(0)
Moss, 2002; Rose, 1997; Wolf, 1996). Indeed, I had argued in the past for the importance of
accounting for reflexivity, positionality, geopolitical relations, and embodiment as part of
research ethics and knowledge production processes (Sultana, 2007). This was part of a
collection that critically engaged with issues around participatory research ethics (Cahill
et al., 2007). I add to those contributions here to further demonstrate how embodied
emotionalities are important.
In my field research with communities that lack access to secure water sources and face
numerous marginalizations daily in trying to procure domestic water, navigating multiple
relationalities that exist in tension has to be confronted. For instance, shared emotional
embodiments (in being a local person who had struggled with water insecurity growing up)
are juxtaposed with irreconcilable differences (being currently based in the West and enjoy-
ing regular running water). Guilt and gratitude saturate the water I drink daily as I am
reminded of and viscerally connected to the millions who do not have this luxury that is
often taken for granted by others. My class difference places me as an outsider, despite
commonalities of gender, race, nationality, religion, language, and (in some cases) disability,
that place me as an insider with the vast majority of the women in poor neighborhoods of a
mega-city where I work. At the same time, being a local woman in a patriarchal society
positions me as different from state and local NGO officials, who are predominantly men,
and certainly the (often) white international donor/NGO officials. But being a scholar based
in the West gives me relatively better access to some powerful people and institutions, where
I also have to navigate various intersections of differences and commonalities. While
Western scholars often benefit from whiteness or foreignness in having better access or
privileges in a postcolonial context (cf. Faria and Mollett, 2016), I do not. Thus, being
critically reflexive about my variously situated and relational embodied positionalities
across time and space, and remaining committed to ethical research that enacts solidarity
with marginalized communities, requires continuous attention to various power relations
that can both privilege and marginalize me as well as being careful and diligent to ensure
that knowledge co-produced with research participants are as truthful to existing realities as
possible.
All this requires emotional labor.
3
Emotional labor is involved in navigating intersection-
alities of differences across gender, race, age, education, religion, geopolitical location, insti-
tutional privileges, and bodily abilities. Such factors influence what relationships are formed
or possible, what “data” are produced or collected, as well as what failures or uncertainties
arise. Embodied intersectionalities that are navigated and negotiated require understanding
how bodies are read, related to, rejected, or celebrated. This is imbricated in how my cor-
poreal, lived, female body is often read as being out of place in public spaces or improper in
asking challenging questions to men (as white or foreign people are generally allowed such
privileges in racialized postcolonial contexts), and in the interpretations of body language
and social norms of acceptability in various spaces, and thus influences the production of
intersubjectivities through the research process. For instance, whether a researcher’s gender,
race, corporeality, and clothing are deemed socio-culturally acceptable influences research
encounters in patriarchal contexts, how the body comports (or not) can create relational
emotions of (dis)connections or becomes subject to respectability politics, as well as refract-
ing various relations of power that impacts field experiences. Furthermore, what the
researcher’s own body allows (e.g. disability, illness) also plays a critical role in the research
process, in how relationships are crafted or maintained, how data are gathered, and what
becomes revealed or repressed (cf. Garland-Thompson, 2011). In ableist academia, the
realities of our own embodied subjectivities are often not taken into account in how that
can inspire, frame, influence, or limit our field research (e.g. Moss and Teghtsoonian, 2008).
Johnson et al. 13
Such challenges are daily lived realities that require additional attention in resolving emo-
tionalities of the field, while occupying such an embodied subject position can result in
unexpected possibilities and alliances. For instance, my health does not permit me to haul
containers of water with the women I work with, who have to do this every day as part of
their gendered reproductive labor, yet shared experiences of daily bodily pain create inter-
subjective empathies and commonalities despite differences. Nonetheless, my relational priv-
ilege is ever-present, embodied, and visible to all. It is thus paramount to recognize and
respect the embodied emotionalities of research participants, especially those who take on
burdens and risks in engaging with researchers. Thus, relational emotional embodiments are
important to acknowledge throughout the research process as it can foster greater insights
as well as reciprocal connections with people we research with.
In addition to this, researchers also need to investigate the impacts of their presence and
research process on local communities and contexts not just while they are carrying out
fieldwork but thereafter (Moss, 2002). There are often unforeseen outcomes or consequences
of the research process irrespective of ethical commitments of the researcher. The desires to
do no harm are often confounded by unintended effects of one’s research interactions,
relationships, as well as outputs. In spaces of resource extraction where daily survival is
challenging and unjust spaces are reproduced by several factors and actors, carrying out
field research requires investigating the impacts of one’s presence, interventions, and rela-
tionships. There has to be reciprocity built into any engaged or long-term engagements. This
means being cognizant of how a researcher can use their privileges toward reciprocity,
situated solidarities, and radical vulnerabilities (Nagar and Shirazi, 2019). There are several
ways one can do this collaboratively or with permission, such as: being a conduit of griev-
ances of marginalized peoples to public officials and international donors who otherwise
may not listen to the issues from them but are more likely to listen to a senior or foreign-
based researcher, opening up channels of communication when possible, shedding light on
injustices by co-authoring or writing for a wider audience outside of academia, helping to
collectivize or support a social movement, enhancing networking or skills training for those
who society neglects, helping to access funding or other support that is needed, or identi-
fying powerful actors responsible (and holding them accountable). Such actions must be
enacted in consultation with research communities/participants and ideally not cause further
damage or be deleterious. Addressing issues as they arise is important as false promises are
unethical and can cause harm. The challenges of taking on solidarity-based roles involve the
emotional burden of being read as someone who can possibly bring about change or
improvements, which can lead to the researcher feeling guilty, useless, being an imposter,
or futile. It can also result in ruined relationships and failed long-term engagements.
Thereby, one should be aware of the limitations of desires for positive impacts or how
one’s abilities may be constrained. Impacts of research outputs depend on the identity
and capacity of the researcher too, as well as how one’s research travels after it is written
and spoken about. The impacts are always-already happening, in both directions, thereby
necessitating careful and cautious engagement that has built-in feedback mechanisms for
reflections and corrections.
Despite the challenges involved, using one’s relative privileges to draw attention to issues
as well as working to address them in different ways are what many scholar-activist aca-
demics do. For instance, viscerally engaging with the embodied emotionalities of accessing
water from distant or insecure locations that women and girls face daily in marginalized
communities enabled me to use my educational and West-based privileges to more forcefully
argue for the human right to water to local public officials, international donors, elites, as
well as to academia more broadly. Nonetheless, commitments to engaged scholarship are
14 EPE: Nature and Space 0(0)
not without challenges. These can arise or be inhibited by institutional/university demands
on our time, funding sources and cycles, career trajectories, academic rules of what
“counts,” receptiveness of the researcher by the host community or country, the pertinence
of the research findings, and time and availability of already-exhausted research participants
as well as our own embodied challenges of ethnographic work. Any commitment requires
keen awareness and acceptance of the emotional, intellectual, and physical labor involved
while being willing to engage as much as possible despite limitations and challenges, and
understanding that embodied emotional labor can take a toll over time. Thus, while atten-
tion to embodied emotionalities of fieldwork can offer possibilities of alliances and solid-
arities that are fruitful and rewarding, in other instances there may be rejections, silences,
failed relationships, and thwarted fieldwork. Negotiating these embodied subjectivities of
empirical feminist research call for attention to the ways that research processes are gener-
ally not in our control and never fully go as planned. How “the field” stays with us can
inform and improve our ongoing academic work and future endeavors only if we carefully
learn from each endeavor. Learning from mistakes and practicing radical listening are cen-
tral to this process.
By engaging with embodied emotionalities of field research, especially in spaces of extrac-
tive resources and concomitant injustices, researchers can recognize, acknowledge, and
address the limitations and possibilities of their research in greater detail and with more
nuance, which can assist with enacting more ethical and transformative research. We are not
disembodied academics who are solely intellectual beings, but are situated in intersectionally
marked bodies that both have matter and come to matter in different ways depending on the
context. Emotions do powerful work in how we inhabit our bodies, relate to other bodies
and situations, occupy space, experience and enact power relations, the labor we are willing
to carry out, and how we impact those not just around us but beyond us, through our
research processes, our writing, our activism, and our legacies. I posit that an embodied
emotionalities framework can foster more meaningful research, pedagogy, and scholar-
activism.
Methods and mobility in extractive tuna
fisheries
Elizabeth Havice
University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill, USA
Extraction
Examining industrial tuna extraction is a starting point for studies of the ecological, social,
and political–economic relations shaped via the production and marketing of canned tuna
and fresh/frozen tuna products. These products are commonly sold around the world and
are, respectively, some of the lowest- and highest-priced animal proteins available for
human consumption. “Extraction” plays out in this sector in at least two related forms,
Johnson et al. 15
each of which requires unique methodological consideration given its centrality to the socio-
ecological relations and outcomes of the industry.
The first form relates to the materialities and mobilities associated with firms tracking
and hunting fish as they move through the water column, removing them from the seas with
industrial gear, and storing them in freezer containers in preparation for their movement
through global markets. Fishing firms invest in technological innovations (e.g. fishing gear,
sonar and helicopter spotting, fish aggregating devices, and “sustainable” gear improve-
ments) to remove fish from the oceans and efficiently insert them into the global food
system. The practice of hunting fish through the seas challenges the philosophical under-
standing of materiality as “finished,” non-lively, and grounded (Ingold, 2012).
The second relates to extractive geopolitical and geoeconomic relations in the unequal
system of states upon which this industry was founded. Historically, and building from
colonial legacies, states and firms in the “global North” have turned to international aid,
fisheries management, and fishing practices to influence the terms of fishing to their own
political and economic benefit. These terms have generally been designed to exploit coastal
and island states’ resources while excluding the resource owner from returns associated with
participation in the global value chains that start in their waters and with their fish. For
instance, in the Western and Central Pacific Ocean—the source of roughly 60% of global
tuna supply—most fish are extracted inside of Pacific Island countries’ 200-mile exclusive
economic zones. As former colonies, most Pacific Island countries have long been integrated
into the global economy and global geopolitical relations, despite the fact that they are
geographically remote and some of the smallest economies in the world. Contemporary
relations of extraction stem from these histories: foreign firms from around the world
catch these fish in Pacific Island countries’ waters. Once extracted, fish are transshipped
to industrial manufacturing centers for processing (e.g. Thailand and Ecuador) or directly to
consumer markets (primarily Europe, Japan, and the United States). As such, the industry
“touches down” in the Pacific primarily (though not exclusively) through fisheries policy and
fishing licensing fees. Recently, Pacific Island counties have used property rights to recon-
figure extractive practices and relations in their favor (see Havice 2018), though many
challenges associated with gaining power in the highly competitive global food economy
– that has long exploited raw materials from the ‘Global South’ – remain.
This piece contributes to the aims of this special section by illustrating and arguing that
these intersecting meanings of extraction demand methodological approaches alert to the
ways that material forces and mobility are harnessed politically, economically (Cresswell,
2010; Peters et al., 2018), and culturally (Bestor, 2000). At the point of production, tuna and
the vessels hunting them through the seas are out-of-sight and in motion for weeks, if not
months, at a time. Mobility extends beyond the seas: nature, turned resource, turned com-
modity, is also in motion throughout the value chains that link the oceans, competing firms
and states, and consumers throughout the world.
Mobility and methods
A central methodological challenge for research on these two intersecting forms of extrac-
tion in fisheries, then, is how to identify and analyze the range of mobilities that make the
sector, and its socio-economic relations and outcomes. Methodological frameworks that
emphasize multi-sitedness and/or strategies for understanding geographically dispersed rela-
tions offer possibilities. Global value chain or global production chain analysis unites
method and theory to examine how things move from the realm of extraction and into
the sphere of circulation (Gereffi and Korzeniewicz, 1994). Feminist and critical approaches
16 EPE: Nature and Space 0(0)
in this literature emphasize tracing and quantifying inter-firm relations and the uneven
power relations that defy national boundaries as a theory of contemporary global capital-
ism, emphasizing that value chains are not only constituted by what is included in them, but
what, who, and which places are excluded or expulsed from them (Bair and Werner, 2011).
Innovations such as multi-sited ethnography (Marcus, 2011), institutional ethnography
(Billo and Mountz, 2016), and event ethnography (Campbell et al., 2014) are tactics for
observing and making sense of global connections. However, these methods—particularly
the global value chain method—have been applied sparsely to conceptualize extraction and
industrial and corporate dynamics in these industries (for more on this argument, see
Baglioni and Campling, 2017, for exceptions, see Bridge, 2008; Bunker, 1988; Ciccantell
and Smith, 2009; Gellert, 2003; Havice and Campling, 2017; Kaplinsky and Morris, 2016).
Further, there are few reflections on how scholars do the work of tracing extractive resource
relations that span the globe, and what priorities they juggle in the process, even when the
researcher inserts herself into the story of commodity-based global connections (e.g. Tsing,
2015; West, 2012).
Capturing mobility with multi-sited approaches raises ethical and practical questions
(see, e.g. Katz, 1994). For instance, in prioritizing the study of global connections and
tracing tuna from extraction through the value chain, I focus empirically on market dynam-
ics, corporations as units of analysis (see also Johnson, Zalik, this collection), and state–firm
relations. Even in parts of my work on tuna-based development in Pacific Island countries, I
have examined how the politics of resource management and the economics of global
market dynamics shape the jobs and production practices in the industry (Havice and
Reed, 2012). That is, my analyses prioritize political–economic dynamics over giving
voice to workers and activists that live the extractive experience (see Billo, this collection,
Marcus, 1995, Mollett, this collection, Valdivia and Lu, this collection).
Practically speaking, capturing mobility with multi-sited work requires being mobile: the
embodied privilege of access to, and movement through, vastly different social worlds linked
in extractive value chains. Methods attentive to mobility and movement in extractive sectors
require access to high level government officials and industry representatives who are gen-
erally uninterested in disclosing commercially valuable information on profit margins, raw
material sourcing strategies, and responsiveness to sustainability and labor concerns to
academic researchers. For my dissertation, I gathered data and conducted interviews in
14 countries to draw diverse processes (ranging from power politics in World Trade
Organizations negotiations to industrial organization in fish processing plants and every-
thing in between) together in explanations of how, where, and to what effect firms and states
govern resource extraction. As frequently as I interviewed fishers and vessel owners in gritty
and bustling port zones or observed working conditions in the tuna processing plants dulled
by the clattering of cans moving along the assembly line, I have conducted interviews and
observation in frigid air-conditioned government and aid offices and corporate boardrooms.
Zalik (this collection) describes this as the privilege of whiteness and “Northerness,” and
notes the ways an embodiment can grant access, as well as protect the privileged researcher
from forms of violence and intimidation that accompany everyday life in and around extrac-
tive sectors (see also Valdivia and Lu, this collection).
Where then does a multi-sited research approach place me on a positionality spectrum
often characterized by selection between (1) engaging with institutionalized industrial activ-
ity as a means to understand it, or (2) working alongside those resisting such industrial
activity, which overtime will restrict or disallow access to formal corporate activities and/or
firm representatives (see also Sultana, 2007)? My research has involved engagement at both
points, but has been shaped and mediated by detailed study of and collaboration with ‘the
Johnson et al. 17
state’, which in the case of fisheries and other extractives, is the ‘resource owner’. States play
a constitute role in extractive sectors generally, though the role of the state varies along with
material variation in distinct industries. In the tuna industry, state bodies govern access to
the fish. As such, state bodies are the gateways between two mobile processes: extracting a
resource in motion in the sphere of extraction, and dictating initial terms through which it
enters into the sphere of circulation in global value chains. The state not only sits between
“uocorporate, private industry” seeking access and profits and “resistance” groups striving
for more equal distribution of returns or more sustainable practices; as resource owner, state
bodies themselves also occupy these position and enact them via resource management.
Positionality and engaged scholarship in research on extractives
At the time I initiated my dissertation research, the Pacific Islands Forum Fisheries Agency
(FFA), an inter-governmental organization that coordinates fisheries governance initiatives
among its 17 sovereign member states, was beginning to commission ongoing analysis of
trade, market, and industry dynamics in the tuna industry. The organization was established
in the 1970s as coastal and island states were declaring sovereignty over what came to be
known as the 200-mile exclusive economic zone. The FFA formed part of an effort on the
part of the Pacific Island states to begin to claim tuna as theirs and charge fees to foreign
fishing fleets. From those origins, FFA had long focused on building regional cooperation
around issues “on the water” such as fisheries management and foreign fishing licensing and
access fees. In the early 2000s, the organization sought to build member countries’ expertise
on how power and market dynamics throughout the chain shaped practices and possibilities
related to fisheries management. Here, FFA’s policy interests and my research interests met.
In 2005, FFA hired me as part of team of researchers illuminating the trade and market
dynamics of the global tuna industry (for examples of this work, see Hamilton et al., 2011,
Havice and Campling, 2018). All interest groups across the tuna value chain—foreign gov-
ernment officials overseeing oceans governance and trade relations, vessel owners, process-
ing firms, branded manufacturers, and even procurement officers at large retail outlets and
environmental advocacy organizations—are centrally concerned with the tuna in FFA
member countries’ waters. Since Pacific Island countries own and manage the fish that
foreign firms and states want and advocacy groups want to conserve, when Pacific Island
countries request that those firms meet with a researcher for a study, the firms comply. As
such, my work for FFA has granted me access to people, places, and data that enables
globally scaled political–economic analysis of extractive practices and relations (i.e. extrac-
tion in both senses defined above).
In working for FFA, I engage with, rather than contra-to, either the industrial activity or
state-led resource management practices that combine to make the sector. This methodo-
logical approach reflects the resource materiality and historical geopolitical and geoeconom-
ic relations in the sector and requires interpreting data from government and corporate
actors with overlapping, but distinct, political–economic interests, and making decisions
about short-term and long-term research goals and alliances.
Is work in this capacity “neutral”? Does the applied dimension of my research make me a
scholar-activist? I have made an explicit decision to work for the Pacific Island governments
as they launch their own initiatives to strengthen their sovereignty over resource extraction
and ocean space more broadly, and in turn over foreign fleets and capital that have benefit-
ted economically from extraction for decades. While I strive for “objective” and rigorous
data analysis, reporting and in-region trainings, this work is explicitly aimed at identifying
and confronting the history of extractive geopolitical relations. It is a process of revealing
18 EPE: Nature and Space 0(0)
and identifying the linkages between small, remote island states and global power dynamics,
as well as the possibility of reconfiguring extractive relations. It involves attention not only
to power dynamics between Pacific Island countries and “foreign” firms and state, but also
to the diverse economies, resource endowments, cultures, and development aspirations of
FFA member countries. The mobile tuna resources being hunted through the seas intertwine
the FFA member countries with a web of global states, firms, and interests groups, and in
turn require the FFA to balance national and regional interests (Havice, 2018). In the
process of this work, I have witnessed an historical moment in which some of the smallest
states in the world—long dominated by foreign powers, colonial legacies, and the violence of
global economic integration—are using resource sovereignty and knowledge about tuna
value chains to reconfigure extractive relations. In rolling out a collaborative approach to
managing tuna access, they have exerted power over some of the largest and most powerful
states in the world; that said, this project does not impact all FFA member countries in the
same ways.
In the midst of the engagements, how do I navigate the relationship between “applied”
and academic research? My work for FFA at times runs parallel to academic work, but at
other times it intersects with, and informs, my academic work directly. I now make my
applied work visible to the academy, including research reports and related workshops and
training activities in annual reports, documenting it on my CV and discussing it with
collaborators and students. Managing the boundary between the two has become an oppor-
tunity for coupling academic work on mobile and transboundary extractive practices and
relations with a long-range commitment to engaged scholarship.
Engaged research with “oppositional”
corporate actors
Adrienne Johnson
University of San Francisco, USA
Introduction
What does “engaged research” look like alongside “oppositional” research participants and
what sorts of productive interventions are possible with such actors? These questions are
relevant to the study of natural resource sectors where one’s research may be situated
alongside “oppositional” actors. In critical geography research, “oppositional” actors are
characterized by those who hold views that are deeply problematic, conflicting, and/or
outright oppositional to the researcher’s own perspectives, and are often responsible for
exploitative or oppressive relations (Thiem and Robertson, 2010). Using my personal expe-
riences researching Ecuadorian palm oil companies—actors whom I deemed oppositional
due to their ill treatment of smallholders and support of violent palm oil industry expan-
sion—I argue that a more explicit engagement with the feminist approach of critical reflex-
ivity assists academics in navigating research obstacles and shifts in critical perspectives
when confronted with political difference via reflection. A case for the creation of a
Johnson et al. 19
broad conceptualization of engaged research is made as social and political constraints
associated with this work may cause “engagement” to resemble a more modest approach.
Finally, it is recognized that while oppositional research is a worthwhile endeavor, it is also a
privileged form of research that is limited to those whose intersectional identities are seen as
“neutral” or non-threatening by the entity they are studying. Overall, this piece contributes
to ongoing dialogue in feminist geography and FPE on the importance of reflexive research
approaches and further expands these conversations to address how researchers navigate
power and privilege in sites of oppositional power dynamics.
Engaged research is concerned with power inequality and injustice and seeks to make
constructive interventions in politics for the purposes of empowering marginalized groups
and transforming our world in a positive way (McGuirk and O’Neill, 2012). An important
observation arising from engaged research on extraction sectors is that it is often pursued
alongside, and sometimes with the support of, the very same marginalized groups its out-
comes are intended for (cf. Kirsch, 2018; Sawyer, 2004). Although all research has its
challenges, working alongside participants whose political views align with the researcher
facilitates working relationships and trust, making the research endeavor a smoother pro-
cess. But what if the political views of the researcher do not align with the group or entity
that is the main focus of their study? In these complicated situations, is the pursuit of an
engaged research agenda still possible? And what form may it take?
Reflexivity and “ethnographic limbo”
Inspired by feminist geography research on methods and methodology, this piece sheds light
on the negotiation of one’s identity when interacting with (corporate) oppositional actors in
a research capacity (England, 2002; Mullings, 1999; Thiem and Robertson, 2010). As many
feminist geographers argue, researchers never remain an objective party in the research
process and therefore should employ an introspective or reflexive approach to understand
the power relations and shifting identities (of both the researcher and participants) involved
in data collection and interpretation (Billo and Hiemstra, 2013; England, 1994; Hanson,
1997; Katz, 1994; Mullings, 1999; Sultana, 2007; this collection). Our subjective position-
alities, informed by intersections of gender, class, and race, shape the research experience by
influencing research methods, knowledge generation techniques, and (in)access to research
communities (Faria and Mollett, 2016; Nightingale, 2011; Smith, 2013 [1999]; Sultana,
2007). Documenting our reflexive research endeavors moves us away from “tidy” reflections
of research experiences and forces us to grapple with the complexities and contradictions of
everyday life (Katz, 1994) while acknowledging emotion and corporeality that undergird
textured social research accounts (Bondi, 2002; Dyck, 1993; see Sultana, Valdivia, and Lu,
this collection). Approaches to conceptualizing and conducting long-term research in oppo-
sitional spaces such as companies, which are informed by feminist insights such as those
mentioned above, are thus extremely helpful as they encourage researchers to embrace their
“ethnographic limbo” (Bobrow-Strain, 2007) characterized by being unable to fully support
the politics of corporations but simultaneously driven to comprehend their motivations and
logics (see Valdivia and Lu, this collection for a related discussion). Ultimately, feminist
methodology complements and reinforces the goals of engaged research, which is to chal-
lenge power structures in order to improve life circumstances.
Feminist approaches grounded in reflexivity and reflection (e.g. Chacko, 2004; Sultana,
2007; Sundberg, 2014) have assisted me in coming to terms with the ambiguity and com-
plexity I face (and continue to face) while in the field. My dissertation project examined the
emergence of a multi-stakeholder industry-led certification program for the creation of
20 EPE: Nature and Space 0(0)
sustainable palm oil. The initiative is called the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO)
and is globally known for creating global production standards by which palm oil producers
(companies and the smallholders they buy fruit from) voluntarily abide. The goal of my
research was to develop a nuanced and textured account of all actors involved in the RSPO
and their perspectives. However, given the desires of smallholders (further explained below),
my research required me to spend much time interrogating the practices, actions, and logics
of corporate actors. Rather than simply relying on company websites, document databases,
and online chat rooms for company information (similar to Warnaars, 2012), I spent several
weeks alongside corporate actors during boardroom meetings, tradeshow fairs, and long
rides back to the city to gather information and experience the geographies of corporate
spaces myself.
My dissertation findings were based on personal experiences with company employees to
whom I initially imagined myself to be opposed because of their beliefs surrounding small-
holder palm oil production. For almost 10 years, I have worked alongside smallholders and
have studied their politics in both Ecuador and Indonesia. In these contexts, smallholders
are often noted as being marginalized in industry decision-making, particularly in RSPO
activities (Cheyns, 2014; Johnson, 2019). In Ecuador, smallholders (who own less than
50 hectares of palm production) account for approximately 87% of the country’s producers
and experience major power imbalances with palm oil companies. Many companies, who
buy palm fruit from smallholders and often supply them with equipment (through loans)
and technical assistance, are accused of offering low prices for high quality fruit to increase
their profits, or blaming smallholders for the spread of plant diseases due to their “archaic”
cultivation practices (Johnson, 2017). Practices such as these further add to the perceived
and material strong-hold companies have over smallholders.
Power and privilege in oppositional spaces
My privileged research position and a collective desire (together with smallholders) to lever-
age that privilege in a way that could possibly improve smallholder experiences informed my
decision to study a palm oil company from the inside. This desire was driven by the large
frustration many smallholders experienced when it came to interactions with companies.
For them, setting up meetings with higher up personnel or getting “straight” answers from
managers about the pricing of fruit proved extremely difficult. These experiences stood in
complete contrast to my own interactions with the same upper-level personnel who swiftly
opened up their offices to me and were more than willing to speak about their work or
market dynamics (see, in contrast, Billo, this collection). There is little doubt that these
remarkably different experiences were shaped and determined by the power relations sur-
rounding race, class, and gender identity (Abbott, 2006; Mullings, 1999; see Zalik, this
collection). As a Canadian, white-presenting female scholar I was read as a neutral foreigner
(and perhaps a “harmless” one due to my femaleness) (see, in contrast, Billo, this collection)
who had minimal knowledge about the local context and specifically the grievances that
smallholders had against the company. This was quite different from the experiences of the
mostly male colonos or local non-indigenous farmers who were seen by the company as
biased and disruptive since they had a stake in the conflict and often gave loud, unsolicited
opinions. Company employees took much time to explain to me the intricacies of the palm
oil market and the work of the company. I suspect this was because my US-based PhD
education prompted company personnel to interpret me as someone who had the “capacity”
to “understand” and “value” the purpose of their work on a higher level. Again, this
contrasted heavily with the common experiences of smallholders whose disagreements
Johnson et al. 21
with the palm oil company were often read as a symptom of them not fully understanding
the functionings of the company and the market due to their limited political–economic
knowledge. The ease through which my “non-threatening” identity facilitated “insider”
access to the company made me acutely aware of my positional privilege (England, 2006;
Faria and Mollett, 2016; Fisher, 2015; Katz, 1994; Sultana, 2007)—privilege that ultimately
allowed me to conceptualize and execute my research project, and position myself among
oppositional company actors in the first place. Upon reflection, I’ve realized that the enter-
prise of oppositional research is an approach not available to all.
Shifting identities, shifting perspectives
My commitment to approaching research in a flexible and critically reflexive way proved
helpful, sometimes in unexpected ways. First, when controversial topics such as land con-
flicts came up in many of the conversations I had with company representatives, they min-
imized the direct social and environmental impacts that the sector had on surrounding
ecosystems and communities. In these situations, I suppressed the urge to speak out and
correct these unfair and problematic depictions, and I would remind myself that the goal of
my research was to learn about the logics of corporate actors, their intersubjectivities, and
specifically what was motivating their beliefs and actions in the palm oil industry. This
“tactical witholding” (Bobrow-Strain, 2007) worked to the benefit of my research in the
long-run, in that it made company employees more likely to “open up” and facilitated more
candid, casual conversations during which they gave less staged, PR-type responses.
Second, I found that although my “open” research approach helped me strengthen the
opinions I had on some topics, it also worked to complicate and even shift my opinions on
others. An example illustrating this relates to the role that smallholders play in the trans-
mission of palm oil plant diseases. At the beginning of my research, I assumed that palm oil
companies were the primary vectors of the disease since they control the largest plantations
in the country. However, after speaking to several scientists and technicians, I learned that
smallholders too play a significant role in the transmission of diseases as many of them share
equipment with fellow farmers. Cross-contamination occurs through the sharing of equip-
ment such as boots, fertilizer spray tanks, or malayas (cutters), which increases the rate of
new infections. To reduce transmission, the company offered smallholders trainings on
preventative sanitation practices and physical treatments to quell the disease.
Smallholders were often ambivalent about these offerings (perhaps suspicious of the com-
pany’s motivations), and many refused to invest in measures that could potentially protect
their plantations from new infections. In these moments, I found myself frustrated by my
new knowledge of the crucial role smallholders play in spreading disease and their refusal to
engage in disease prevention measures. Surprisingly, I realized that my perspectives on
smallholder disease prevention and management became more “open” to the views of com-
panies. Initially, I was uneasy about this change of opinion as I felt I was “siding” with the
company; however, I recalled the feminist understanding that neither the researcher or the
researched have fixed subject positions (England, 2002) and that such dilemmas of conflict
and confusion are expected outcomes of embodied research. I would add that shifts in
personal perspectives and opinions (particularly in an oppositional context) indicate thor-
ough data collection and thoughtful reflection, which are all components of robust research.
The vast majority of smallholders included in my study supported a reformist perspective
rather than advocating for a complete “take down” of the company or industry as a whole.
This reformist view, along with my desire to maintain long-term contact with the company
for future research purposes, shaped the type of engaged intervention I could produce. In
22 EPE: Nature and Space 0(0)
practical terms, this has meant producing written reports (similar to Havice, this collection)
to be submitted to both the palm oil company and the RSPO that outline recommendations
on how smallholders can be better represented in corporate and stakeholder activities.
Analyzed beside grand gestures of “ethnography as activism” such as “acting as lawyers”
for marginalized communities (Kirsch, 2018) or engaging in protests supporting community
members (Sawyer, 2004), these efforts may seem small and less significant. However, I argue
that they are important as a form of political engagement and advocacy sought by those less
empowered, in this context, the smallholders. Furthermore, they offer tools directed toward
negotiation to improve the material conditions of small producers, which is exactly what
many smallholders in Ecuador seek.
Concluding thoughts
Ultimately, research that engages both “sides” in extractive spaces characterized by oppo-
sition between corporate actors and small producers is a much-needed form of study. In the
process of undertaking such work, researchers must consider how to design constructive
interventions that will contribute to, or enact, meaningful transformations in the commu-
nities where they work. However, the ability to actually carry out such research is highly
contingent on the intersectional identity of the researcher being congruous with the racial,
gender, and class structures that constitute and maintain the organization being studied.
Having a perceived “neutral” or “non-threatening” identity (often characterized by the
embodiment of whiteness, “Northerness,” and higher education) facilitates access to oppo-
sitional spaces while simultaneously reinforcing the colonial, hierarchical underpinnings of
these spaces. This ultimately reproduces unequal access, which in turn limits the enterprise
of engaged research with oppositional actors to the privileged few.
Decolonizing methodologies for climate
justice research
Tracey Osborne
University of California, Merced, USA
My research is concerned with the political ecology of climate change mitigation. This has
included studies of forest conservation and the role of Indigenous Peoples as well as work
that supports the global strategy of designating certain forms of carbon “unburnable,”
which entails keeping fossil fuels underground. These areas of research fall within the
realm of climate justice, which refers to both a discourse and social movement emphasizing
the ethical and political economic dimensions of climate change. While the immediate causes
of climate change are the combustion of fossil fuels and unsustainable land use, particularly
deforestation and forest degradation, political ecologists have linked these activities to
underlying systems of power that have historically played out through colonialism, capital-
ism, and industrialization. Critical scholars have also shown how mainstream research
approaches focused on the economic dimensions of climate change reproduce highly
Johnson et al. 23
exclusionary, reductionist, and extractive modes of knowledge production. In this short
intervention, I make a case for using decolonizing methodologies for climate justice research
in the context of these deep-rooted systems of inequity through the example of the Climate
Alliance Mapping Project (CAMP).
4
CAMP is a collaborative effort of academics, environ-
mental organizations, and Indigenous groups working toward an equitable response to
climate change through research, maps, and digital storytelling.
Launched in 2015, CAMP has been coordinated by myself and a team of researchers
5
committed to climate justice. It takes as a starting point the science on carbon budgets in
relation to existing fossil fuel reserves. If we are to limit the global temperature increase to
1.5C, 83% of known and economically accessible fossil fuels must remain unextracted,
unburned, and underground (Benedikter et al., 2016), so-called unburnable carbon.
Analyses of unburnable carbon tend to emphasize the financial dimensions of stranded
assets, investor confidence, and potential impacts on the stock market, as well as calcula-
tions of fossil fuel reserves to remain unexploited (Benedikter et al., 2016; Griffin et al., 2015;
McGlade and Ekins, 2015). One highly cited study draws on results of an integrative eco-
nomic model to determine the quantities and geographic location for keeping fossil fuels
underground. McGlade and Ekins (2015) argue that if the world is to limit global temper-
ature increase to 2C, a third of oil reserves, half of gas reserves and over 80% of known
coal reserves must remain unused from 2010 to 2050. Due to high costs of production in
particular geographic areas, they determine that the majority of fossil fuel reserves in the U.
S., Canada, the Middle East, and the former Soviet Union should remain unexploited.
While these arguments for unburnable carbon make an important case for keeping fossil
fuels in the ground, such economistic approaches ignore social, cultural, and ecological
values, which are the purview of climate justice and the basis for the CAMP.
Following the calls for climate justice articulated by many environmental and Indigenous
groups, CAMP identifies, maps, and shares information about the ecologically and cultur-
ally sensitive places that should be priority areas for avoiding fossil fuel extraction. The
project includes research, mapping, digital stories, and data visualization, all of which are
housed on an evolving, interactive website (climatealliancemap.org). CAMP emerged
through conversations with the leadership team at Amazon Watch, an organization dedi-
cated to protecting the Amazon rainforest and the climate by supporting the rights of
Indigenous Peoples.
CAMP is inspired by decolonizing methodologies, a more horizontal approach that
challenges conventional research, which to date has privileged Western knowledge, margin-
alized other worldviews, and been aligned with an imperialist and colonial history (Smith,
2013 [1999]). Western science and its associated research methods, themselves a type of
extractive industry, have long taken place in the service of industrialization and economic
development, which in turn has resulted in social and ecological violence, human rights
abuses, the dispossession of Indigenous lands, and ecological degradation across multiple
scales (Gaudry, 2011; Smith, 2013 [1999]; Steinhauer, 2002). Considering how research itself
is extractive and political, decolonizing approaches are an essential starting point for
research aligned with social justice (Smith, 2013 [1999]). Inspired by Linda Tuhiwai
Smith’s work, the remainder of this article lays out four key features of decolonizing meth-
ods that have informed CAMP and are aligned with the objectives of climate justice research
more generally. My purpose is to offer a methodological starting point for scholar-activists
working for climate justice (see also Sultana, this collection).
Participatory Action Research (PAR): Scholar-activists of climate justice often employ
PAR, an approach that challenges traditional forms of research seen as hierarchical and
extractive. PAR attempts to democratize data collection, choice of questions, and analysis
24 EPE: Nature and Space 0(0)
by working collaboratively with non-academic partners in the co-production of knowledge
(Kindon et al., 2009; Pain et al., 2013). PAR is largely distinguished from other approaches
in that its goal is not only to study and analyze the world, but to advance social justice goals
as identified by marginalized stakeholders (Cahill, 2007). CAMP emerged from collabora-
tion with environmental organizations and Indigenous groups that articulated a desire for
maps with particular layers of concern. Our first map of the Amazon basin located priority
areas for keeping fossil fuels underground based on criteria identified by partner organiza-
tions: places where existing and proposed fossil fuel leases overlap with culturally and eco-
logically important zones, represented by Indigenous land and conservation areas.
6
These
maps support activist campaigns to keep fossil fuels underground in culturally and ecolog-
ically important areas, adding an important justice-based geographical specificity to the
science on unburnable carbon as a climate change mitigation strategy.
Alliance building: Networking, collaboration, and alliance building are central to the
climate justice movement. The movement includes Indigenous Peoples, environmental
NGOs, civil society groups, journalists, economically marginalized communities, faith-
based groups, concerned citizens, sustainable business owners, philanthropists, and academ-
ics who have combined their strengths in research, policy, education, analysis, organizing,
production, and fundraising toward shared goals (Osborne, 2017). These groups collaborate
in ways that amplify outcomes beyond what would be possible by individuals and smaller
groups alone. A central goal of CAMP has been alliance building—among and between
Indigenous communities and organizations, climate justice NGOs, and research scholars.
We do this through an ongoing and iterative process including formal meetings, informal
conversations, workshops, conferences, and collaborative research. While the demands of
academia differ substantially from those of activism, there is tremendous power in building
strategic alliances and a community of praxis (theoretically informed practice) committed to
an equitable response to climate change (Osborne, 2017).
Storytelling: Stories are a core tool of decolonizing methodologies, which emphasize that
stories must be told accurately and within their historical and geographical place-based
contexts (Smith, 2013 [1999]). In an increasingly interconnected world, digital storytelling
has become a growing movement to democratize media by providing ordinary people with
the skills needed to share stories about issues important to their lives (Couldry, 2008).
Digital storytelling has also played a critical role in climate justice work by sharing the
experiences of marginalized and front-line communities most impacted by climate injustices.
Information about the socio-ecological implications and local experiences of fossil fuel
extraction, transport, and finance is often obscured, and our CAMP partners identified
story mapping as an important strategy for making these features more transparent and
visible on the landscape. The aim of these story maps is to support activist campaigns, build
broad-based alliances, increase public awareness, and move climate policy toward justice.
The CAMP team is in the process of developing the storytelling component of the project in
collaboration with partner organizations.
Dissemination of research: Sharing research results is central to public scholarship.
Published mainly in academic journals locked behind high paywalls, research rarely reaches
broader publics (Tennant et al., 2016). As an antidote, scholars are increasingly publishing in
open access journals and using forms of digital and social media including blogs, social net-
works, and photo and video sharing to reach wider audiences (Kitchin et al., 2013). These
dissemination methods are aligned with some of the media used by social movements for
organizing and mobilization while challenging academics to think differently about how we
pose research questions (Juris, 2012). Although unequal access and representation is always
of concern, if social media is employed in critically reflexive ways it can provide an important
Johnson et al. 25
digital space for collaboration, alliance building, and engagement—key elements for work in
the realm of climate justice (Carroll and Hackett, 2006; Sui and Goodchild, 2011). The CAMP
website, with its maps and digital stories, provides an important space in which climate justice
information can be disseminated to broader publics.
While there is power in making visible climate injustice through data, maps, and stories,
there are also potential dangers. Maps can identify the location of economically valuable
resources that could be exploited, or of sacred sites that could be violated by extractors. Also
given the increased violence toward environmental leaders globally, stories about highly
political issues such as oil development could pose serious threats. We recognize trust as
being essential to alliance building which we foster through authentic relationships, ongoing
conversations, and clear data sharing agreements. For example, certain information such as
sacred sites will not be made publicly visible on maps. In some cases, digital stories will
remain anonymous without revealing images of the storyteller as a way to protect front-line
community leaders. While the project follows standard institutionalized research ethics and
practices, this type of collaborative and engaged scholarship will require precautions and
ethical practices that go far beyond Institutional Review Board guidelines (Glass and
Newman, 2015).
The urgency of climate change demands a broad range of research approaches and
methods. As a public political ecologist, I am committed to employing decolonizing meth-
odologies and designing research questions in collaboration with activist and community
partners. The robust analysis produced from this type of engaged scholarship aims to meet
the needs of activist/community partners, have broader policy relevance, and also forward
theoretical debates and academic scholarship (Derickson and Routledge, 2015). While this
work is certainly challenging, the urgency of climate change and the weak international
commitments of country governments have been key motivating factors in my decision to
join a growing community of scholar-activists using decolonizing methodologies toward a
just response to climate change. This work reflects the nature of climate justice as both a
discourse and social movement, which is increasingly co-produced between researchers and
activists in new and innovative ways.
Extractive entanglements: Environmental
justice and the realpolitik of life-with-oil
Gabriela Valdivia
University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill, USA
Flora Lu
University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
In this essay, we reflect on our approach to studying life-with-oil in the coastal city of
Esmeraldas, a key infrastructural site of the Ecuadorian state-owned oil industry. Oil
exports account for about 30% of the nation’s total export income and close to 30% of
its public sector revenue. Esmeraldas, with approximately 160,000 people, is home to the
26 EPE: Nature and Space 0(0)
end of the pipelines carrying oil from oilfields in the Amazon; the state-owned Refiner
ıa
Estatal Esmeraldas; and the maritime terminal Balao, which exports oil to international
markets. “Life-with-oil” is our short-hand for the entanglements between possibilities for
political existence, social reproduction—activities for “caring” that make life possible and
meaningful (Fraser, 2016; Katz, 2001; Koffman and Raghuram, 2015)—and oil industry-
related activities.
We start from the premise that when social reproduction is degraded and/or threatened
by ruinous environmental conditions (such as contamination), people often organize in
resistance and opposition. Therefore, we expected to hear from residents about how they
denounce environmental harms caused by the oil industry in Esmeraldas. However, in a
study of 137 households we conducted in Esmeraldas in 2014, we found that residents do not
always mobilize against oil. In fact, residents in neighborhoods adjacent to the refinery often
referred to it as a “good neighbor” (see, in contrast, Osborne, this collection) that sponsors
compensation programs, even as toxic exposure continues to routinely manifest in head-
aches, inflammatory diseases, and chronic respiratory, digestive, and skin ailments (Valdivia
and Lu, 2016). Moreover, Esmeraldas is no stranger to political resistance; its history reflects
legacies of organized black struggle against colonial powers, national incorporation, and
plantation capitalism (see Mollett, this collection). Why then, have residents not overwhelm-
ingly organized against the injustices associated with oil activities?
The short answer is that while the oil industry degrades life in Esmeraldas, how residents
relate to it is entangled with structural poverty and devaluation that exceed the oil industry
itself. Recognizing this entanglement confronted our intellectual and advocacy approaches
as scholars of environmental justice, complicating our own understandings on how extrac-
tive industries tend to stick around even when they are associated with harm and premature
death. These complications led to discomfort in our scholarship; we felt as if the commonly
used explanations of capital-centered domination and oppression were poised on a shifting
terrain of truth regimes. We recognize that our own positionalities and privileges inflect our
reading of, and discomfort with, the choices made by those we met in the field. This essay is
an effort to engage more intentionally with these moments of discomfort in our research
about and with life-with-oil, with the aim to continue developing scholarship and advocacy
that is vigilant about how, and on what grounds, we connect across difference and build
solidarity with others (see also Osborne, Zalik, this collection). To illustrate this point, we
focus on the affective dimensions (see also Billo, Johnson, Sultana) of our data collection in
one neighborhood in Esmeraldas. Witnessing events entangled with the oil economy pushed
us to recognize that the impasse we sensed regarding political resistance is not only in the
worlds we study but also in how we study them (see also Havice, Sultana, this collection).
Next, we focus on a series of events in 50 Casas, a fenceline neighborhood of Esmeraldas, to
illustrate this point.
50 Casas
Between 2014 and 2018, our team carried out interviews in the neighborhood “50 Casas,”
located along the Teaone River and directly affected by the activities of the oil industry,
which can be sensed in the air, the water, the skin, the lungs, and the digestive system.
Women and children regularly use the river banks as a space of social gathering and to wash
clothes. Many have developed skin rashes after bathing in the river. Since 2010, 50 Casas has
received state-sponsored health centers, schools, paved roads, and water infrastructure in
compensation for the refinery’s environmental externalities.
Johnson et al. 27
In July 2015, we arrived around 10 am on a Sunday to conduct follow-up interviews. We
were greeted by loud music booming from large speakers installed on the street and crowds
gathered outside, drinking and dancing. On the way to meet our scheduled interviewees, a
loud argument between a woman and a man started nearby. From what we gathered, they
were a couple; he had come to the party to take her home but she refused. A second man
approached them and told the first man to back off. An argument ensued. A knife was
pulled as a loud mob gathered around them, and then someone was stabbed. We sought
cover in the homes of our interviewees.
In one household, a woman was more interested in discussing income insecurity and
risk—often referred to as jugarse la vida or “wagering life”—than the violence in the
street or the impacts of the refinery. Her husband goes to fish for days, returning for one
day or two, and leaving again for several days. Fishermen can earn about US $30 in a three-
day trip, sleeping out at sea in their pangas (small boats). Many in 50 Casas continue to fish
but struggle to make a livelihood. Declining ocean productivity associated with climate
change is exacerbated by regular oil spills that affect equipment, forcing fishermen to go
further out to sea, where they face dangerous fishing conditions far from shore, and hazards
from the illegal traffic of vessels and gas toward Colombia associated with the drug trade.
She also was excited to discuss her social reproduction repertoire. She washed clothes on
the Teaone River and admitted to cleaning off her skin with gasoline to avoid river-related
ailments. With her mother, she sold corviches—deep-fried, cooked and raw plantain dough
stuffed with seafood and peanut paste—in an alley next to the nearby school. On a good
day, they make about USD $5. Her son was present during the interview, doing homework
on a nearby table. “He does not hang out with the wrong kids,” she proudly stated, “and is
not involved in drugs, a big problem in schools.”
In another household, a woman was more forthcoming with information on the party: it
had started the previous afternoon and she had been there all night. “People want to have
fun, enjoy life.” Her make-up was still on, one set of fake eyelashes missing. The party
celebrated the return of a neighbor to the community (“se dio una vuelta” or he “went on a
round trip”). He had invited all neighbors, sponsoring a band, a stage, and alcohol. Later,
we found out that “darse la vuelta” is short-hand for participating in the illicit transport of
drugs from Colombia to Central America. Limited by access to resources, scant labor
opportunities, and environmental degradation, many fishermen are recruited to transport
drugs in their pangas.
Individuals who succeed in darse una vuelta sometimes use the money to purchase a car,
store, or house—something that enhances opportunities for wellbeing. Some decide to trans-
port drugs only once, yet others do it regularly, in which case they can amass great fortunes.
Regardless, the money they earn is then “laundered” in the city, which circulates through
entertainment enterprises, including night clubs, restaurants, and prostitution. Sometimes
they get paid with a brick of cocaine, which they can then resell to distributors for local
consumption.
Uncomfortable witnessings
While we looked for resistance to the oil industry, we met multi-sited struggles to organize
life within institutional assemblages of dehumanization, not against them. This distance
between what we were trained to see and what actually confronted us required a reassess-
ment of our field experiences. We initially looked for what our liberal training taught us to
recognize: “resistance” as legible, intentional, and autonomous strategies and tactics that
denounce wrongdoings, such as opposition to degradation by extractive industries.
28 EPE: Nature and Space 0(0)
Yet ethnographic discomfort signaled an important insight. It was not that people did not
understand the grid of dehumanization, but that we misrecognized how livelihood-enabling
risky activities were ways of existing with the very devaluation of life that we sought to
capture (see also Mollett, this collection). What we observed was political responsiveness
exceeding our existing vocabulary of “resistance.” Part of this equivocation (cf. De la
Cadena, 2015) is due to our own limits as environmental justice scholars: we looked for
“evidence” of wrongdoing, i.e. events, positions, and metrics that define intention and orient
our understanding of responsibility. Our analytical lens was narrowed down by our take on
intersectionality as a “gridlock” of discrimination defined by the classificatory simplicity of
race, gender, and class, which subsumes and subordinates the political ontologies of per-
sonhood to the known (Western) universe (Lozano, 2010: 13). What we did not grasp was
this: there is not a single universal experience of the gridlock of dehumanization and, per-
haps, not even an ontological singular and fixed gridlock to be experienced. In our effort to
find and represent resistance as-we-know-it, we negated the diversity in conception, form,
and practice of what constitutes humanity and care among those whom we met in
Esmeraldas. A Marxist feminist analysis, in addition, allows to see these dynamics within
the frame of social reproduction.
A former fisherman now taxi driver from 50 Casas offered a much clearer analogy of this
point of entangled struggles: Esmeraldas, home to one of the most important infrastructures
of the Ecuadorian oil industry and a socially and environmentally toxic place, is “where
people look for the chance to wager a life.” This is the realpolitik of life-with-oil, a world of
pragmatic choices, tempting payoffs, and risky wagers not directly related to oil but con-
stitutive of how life-with-oil unfolds. No interviewee talked about a direct relationship
between drug–money flow and oil flow, but their narratives illustrate how these are
entangled in the social fabric of marginalized Esmeraldas. Running into (and away from)
stories about the drug economy, while looking for stories about oil as an extractive industry,
allowed us to witness a sample of the myriad other preoccupations that traverse everyday
life-with-oil: drugs in school, keeping the family safe and on a good path, precarious live-
lihoods, criminality, desire for opportunities to make a living (sometimes at high social cost).
These field moments also raised questions about how to represent the effects of extractive
industries on everyday life (see also Zalik, this collection). We carried out “normal” inter-
views while knowing that someone was stabbed, asking ourselves: do we know this person?
Did they survive? We didn’t get involved, a decision based on our assessment of the safety of
our interview team and taking cues from our interviewees. We felt discomfort with decisions
that some of our informants made, such as bathing children in the Teaone River, celebrating
a successful drug delivery, or knowingly participating in money laundering schemes, pros-
titution, and drug sales. We did not contradict or minimize their positions either; witnessing
and listening, even in discomfort and disagreement, became our way of politically coexisting
in this oil city. At the time, this position gave us a glimpse of care and survival under
conditions of harm and exhaustion. It felt disingenuous to evaluate their actions from
our safety as outsiders who can leave, or to assume that our experience of political exis-
tence—i.e. to oppose freely that which wrongs us—is universally shared or morally
desirable.
Our uncomfortable witnessing is mediated by our positionality as environmental justice
scholars who look for stories of activism in sites of socio-environmental devaluation related
to resource extraction. Initially, we did not recognize the stories that met us in 50 Casas as
politically significant: they seemed accidental, even a nuisance, because we did not see their
connections to oil. Yet they revealed dimensions of the realpolitik of life-with-oil, and are
closer to how we experienced it than a simplified story of consent or opposition to oil.
Johnson et al. 29
Thinking with and against these field moments was a chance to “make strange” our own
liberal conceptions of resistance to extractive industry activities, which is colonized by, and
narrowed down to, notions of agency, intentionality, and rationality. Strategies and tactics
of endurance and reproduction that appear incommensurable to our advocacy commit-
ments must not be brushed away as situational and anecdotal (see also Osborne, this col-
lection). As Richa Nagar (2014) reminds us, these ethical encounters require our full
attention; the moments when we recognize our failures in translation are some of the
most important moments of political alliance building.
As academics, we can choose to leave out controversial events in order to strengthen the
narrative of how the oil economy dehumanizes and to avoid ambiguities that slow down
coalition-building. Whether creating narratives without “uncomfortable witnessings” or
treating these difficult moments as the milieu of political existence, we need to ask ourselves:
what kinds of worlds are we writing, how do we write ourselves into these, and whom are we
writing them for?
Building solidarity: Methodological dilemmas
and progressive politics in Intag, Ecuador
Emily Billo
Goucher College, USA
In this paper, I examine the forms through which my researcher positionality was politicized
and the role of subjectivities in shaping my fieldwork, when studying state-led extractivism
in Intag, Ecuador. As a feminist researcher from the US, Ecuadorian state mining officials,
largely from the elite, used my embodied presence to discredit and delegitimize my research.
Officials would often suggest that my research was politically biased and, following conten-
tious, confrontational exchanges with state officials in the region of Intag, I often asked
myself: Was my role as a researcher helping to advance a progressive movement in Intag, or
merely a site for expanding state power? Through a consideration of my feminist subject
position, I employ these research encounters as a point of departure for exploring new ways
of writing, teaching, and conducting progressive politics.
Feminist scholars employ critical self-reflexivity to examine their relationships to a
research community, including how these relations are rooted in institutional structures
of power (Kobayashi, 2003; Nagar, 2002). Yet, a researcher can never have complete knowl-
edge of herself or of research subjects (Rose, 1997). Instead, scholars have argued for
engaging in research from a place of between-ness in which both researcher and researched
engage (England, 1994; Katz, 1994; Kobayashi, 1994). Risa Whitson (2017) argued that
distinguishing between researcher subjectivity and positionality leads to additional ways of
knowing in research. She demonstrated that positionality invites a process of self-reflexivity,
but subjectivities can attune us to the emotions of research: our desires, feelings of affiliation
or disaffiliation, discomfort, and so on. Attention to our “multiple and fractured subjectiv-
ities can help us better understand those with whom we work” (Whitson, 2017: 300). Brenda
Parker (2017) demonstrated how subjectivities, power, and affect play fundamental roles in
30 EPE: Nature and Space 0(0)
research, activism, and social relations (Parker, 2017). Feminist researchers are often forced
to downplay their politics in order to be able to engage a range of participants in the field
(see also Johnson, this collection), while at other moments our subjectivities might be per-
ceived as “killing joy” in progressive movements through a process of constant questioning
(Ahmed, 2017; Parker, 2017). What has been less explored by feminist scholars, however, is
the scrutiny and subsequent dismissal of feminist politics by certain research participants so
as to justify and reinforce “apolitical,” masculine narratives of progress and modernization.
Elite state officials utilized my subject position as a critical feminist scholar from North
America to advance an anti-imperialist politics of neo-extraction. They did so by asserting
to myself and other residents of the community in which I resided that I failed to perform
the role of a masculine, neutral, objective researcher. This paper examines how I grappled
with this politicization of my researcher positionality and subjectivities, reclaiming and
resituating my feminist politics in private, home spaces of research participants (see also
Sultana, this collection).
Embodiment and situated presences in Intag
Over the last decade in Latin America social and environmental progress has become
increasingly linked to state-controlled extraction, making the region an important geograph-
ical space to examine the “fragile, contingent geography of state power” (Pearson and
Crane, 2017: 188). However, as we witness the potential collapse or implosion of these
so-called progressive, pink tide governments, Pearson and Crane (2017) argue that we
must examine “everyday practices of social reproduction” as potential sites to understand
the operation of power. Moreover, Fabricant and Gustafson (2015a,2015b) demonstrate
that left-leaning, progressive discourses obscure more complex arguments about the social
relationships of neo-extraction.
As a researcher critically investigating the relationship between subterranean resources
and the Ecuadorian state, I was already positioned in particular ways prior to entering Intag
in 2013. Ecuadorian state mining company, ENAMI, and its partner, Chilean state com-
pany, CODELCO, have operated the mining concession in Intag known as Llurimagua
since 2013. During Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa’s tenure (2007–2017), foreign and
Ecuadorian researchers, citizens, and activists were criminalized for supposedly inciting
tension between community residents and state-led resource extraction in Intag (Billo and
Zukowski, 2015).
Residents of Intag illustrate a bi-furcation in left-leaning discourses, where industry
employment has persuaded some that extraction is beneficial in the short term. Often this
bi-furcation occurred within the same family. For example, some families that remained
critical of the industry still had a relative who chose to work for the company, while others
refused this employment. Throughout my field research (seven months between 2013 and
2018), any attempt to interview residents of Intag employed by CODELCO and elite state
officials was met with silence. These employed residents and state mining officials were
unwilling to discuss the company, details of mining work, their perceptions of the state,
or any opinions regarding company presence (see in contrast, Johnson, this section). Local
residents employed by the company were also, however, fearful of losing their jobs should
they reveal any shortcomings related to employment or state actions. State discourse was
carefully controlled and monitored, limiting my access to those “bio-politically managed by
the institution” (Billo and Mountz, 2016: 209).
I relied on participant observation to uncover state practices and discourses, attending
community meetings with state and company officials. In these spaces, state officials strove
Johnson et al. 31
to convince researchers and community members alike of the benefits of mining operations.
On occasion they advanced their arguments by utilizing my researcher positionality. In
community meetings, the state called on my embodied white privilege associated with my
residence in North America to argue that Ecuador should have the same opportunities for
development, in this case mining, as the US. Officials also dismissed community knowledge
of water pollution linked to mining when residents referenced the results of community-led
water testing for heavy metals. The potential for this water to be tested in foreign labs (it is
not), where officials highlighted the participation of myself and other foreign researchers in
the collection of water samples, was used to suggest the results were tainted and invalid.
I often became frustrated during and after these meetings and found myself in verbal
exchanges with elite state mining officials that resulted in condescension toward my creden-
tials and research project. Company officials would use my frustration to turn to residents,
asking if I “really wanted to talk to them like that.” Officials suggested that my emotional
outbursts were inappropriate, contradicting the expectation that I perform the role of the
“neutral, masculine” researcher. When my presence challenged state constructions of the
“rational expert” these emotional encounters were used to perpetuate and justify state
claims to apolitical mining discourse.
At the same time as state and company officials tried to discredit me, they also tried to
connect with me concerning our shared “outsider” status. In informal encounters in com-
munities they questioned how I could spend so long in the region. “Wasn’t it ‘boring’?”
officials asked, and “Did I drink the water?” because, according to officials, Intag did not
have potable water. Indeed, Intag does have access to potable water in underground aqui-
fers, but longitudinal community-led water monitoring suggests that exploratory mining has
potential to impact these sources. In these exchanges, my training as a US-based researcher
invited elite state officials to seek out commonalities through our shared privilege. These
encounters called into question my own subjectivities as an activist-scholar conducting
research in a place different from my own everyday realties in the US. Here, again, state
officials, on the basis of privileged subjectivities I held, demonstrated that my positionality
warranted politicization. Yet, in this case, state comments also illustrated the assumptions
officials held about Intag as “not modern” justifying the pursuit of extraction.
Reclaiming and resituating feminist subjectivities
Following several encounters with state officials, I realized that my situated presence in these
public spaces was not furthering my own commitments to feminist politics. Even as I had
come into communities through activist and researcher networks, living with families and
returning each year to build relationships with community members, I did not fully consider,
nor could I know, how my positionality and subjectivities would become politicized. As I
removed myself from these more public confrontations with officials, I deepened caring
relationships with residents who refused employment opportunities in the mining industry.
I was often invited into homes where women cared for their households. In my fieldnotes
I documented these private conversations, where my role was to listen (Ratnam, 2019). I
came to realize that these were spaces where politics were also negotiated. These informal
conversations often began with state politics, but quickly turned to catching each other up
on family and community. Overtime, these research relationships became friendships. Trust
led to emotional connections, where we shared our fears, desires, hopes, and laughter with
each other. In these spaces, my positionality as an outsider was more useful: residents told
me they felt they could confide in me, something that was more difficult to do with friends
and family in a small community.
32 EPE: Nature and Space 0(0)
Campesinas told me about histories of mobilization, ongoing familial struggles, gendered
negotiations in daily lives, desire for steady work, and hopes for their children’s futures.
Women outlined how gendered norms of their families and communities situated them in
particular ways. They were expected to take care of the household and to stay at home, even
as they pushed against these ideals. Other women lamented how health care and education
were still missing in rural Ecuador, worried about opportunities for their children and the
distance they had to travel to go to school. Collectively, they highlighted patriarchal state
relations challenging frameworks of progress and modernization outlined in official state
discourse of extraction. At the same time, residents enacted solidarity and support for each
other, whether in confrontations with state officials or as they sought out ways to work
outside of the confines of extractivism. A politics of care in community members’ relation-
ships to each other underpinned the more public struggles of extractive relationships.
Conclusion
In this paper, I reflected on how I resituated my researcher subjectivities to more precisely
consider my privilege and responsibility as a feminist researcher (see also Sultana, this col-
lection). I came to understand my feminist researcher subjectivities in the space of Intag, not
solely as confronting power in public spaces, but also, and perhaps more meaningfully, as
listening and caring in more private spaces (Lawson, 2007; Ratnam, 2019). I examined how
my researcher subjectivities included emotional solidarity with residents’ pursuit of progres-
sive politics, one that hinged on revealing patriarchal, masculine state relations. Analysis of
women’s everyday relationships allowed me to ask whose bodies the state was protecting, in
whose interests it operated, and to whom was it accountable (Hyndman, 2001). Our con-
versations blurred the boundary of the state, moving institutional analysis of the state from
elite, public discourses to everyday social relationships (Mountz, 2004,2010). Research
encounters in Intag informed and emboldened the feminist subjectivities through which I
write, think, and teach ideas of progressive politics and actually existing state formation.
A politics of representation for extractive
industry research?
Anna Zalik
York University, Canada
Since 2001, I have conducted fieldwork on social contestation surrounding the oil and gas
industry in regions frequently depicted as violent or conflict prone—in particular the Niger
Delta of Nigeria; the Gulf Coast of Mexico; and to a lesser extent, Northern Alberta,
Canada. My research has explored how historical, colonial rule has shaped industrial devel-
opment and community engagement practices surrounding extractive industry. When com-
pleting my dissertation, critical studies of extractive industry were a relatively new arena of
work in development studies, geography, sociology, and anthropology, but the past decade
has seen an explosion of scholarship dealing with this subject matter, including the
Johnson et al. 33
emergence of new journals focusing on these questions, as per Extractive Industries and
Society and Energy Research and Social Science.
My own experiences conducting field research have been shaped by the privileges of
whiteness and “Northerness,” providing me with advantages and access to space within
affected communities and corporate operations, and cushioning me in various ways from
violent encounters that I have witnessed in the field. They have undoubtedly protected me
from more extreme versions of the subtle or overt intimidation researchers face from indus-
trial representatives and private or state security operatives. Over the years I have struggled
considerably with how to discuss and write about these fieldwork experiences in a form that
would not contribute to sensationalism, to superficial depictions of violence in regions
depicted as hazardous, or could be viewed as largely seeking to grant “street cred” to my
fieldwork—a form of coloniality in action.
In part due to these concerns, as well as the sense that my research might be more
forthright and involve less objectification of interviewees and informants as a consequence,
I have generally adopted the industrial firm or corporation as the unit of analysis (see
Johnson, this collection), rather than that of the social movements that may oppose or
negotiate with corporate activities. With this piece I draw from a few examples to consider
the crux of my uncertainty about a suitable representational politics in scholarly-writing and
advocacy on large-scale extractive industry. In recounting these research experiences I raise
some reservations concerning my attempt to adopt—and the scholar-activist goal that
promotes—a position alongside, or in support of, those critiquing the corporation or advo-
cating against extractive industry (see Osborne, Valdivia and Lu, Billo). After almost two
decades of research in this area I ask whether, and in what ways, it is possible to make our
research complementary to broader projects of social transformation? If it is indeed possible
to do so, can I—as researcher—remain attentive to the always-partial, and frequently priv-
ileged element of my personal representations of field experiences and the academic narra-
tives they produce?
Some of my writing examines how industry and state agents represent protest-as-violent
as a means to delegitimate social movements: Industry has sought to distinguish between
licit and illicit activity around contested industries so as to discredit various form of “direct
claims” (including small scale oil “theft” via pipeline tapping) and calls for local “resource
control” of fossil fuels whose status as either privately-held or state-regulated is contested.
Blockades are typically understood by social justice movements as non-violent, civil disobe-
dience. Yet, in both Nigeria and Canada, any form of blockade against industry—what
many would understand as non-violent—is interpreted by industry, government, and local
authorities as not only illegal but also as “violent” resistance. Thus, the distinction between
popular resistance movements and those involved in larger scale contraband trade in oil
resources is blurred, as is the distinction between regional movements for resource sover-
eignty and local militias or armed youth whose connections to powerful cartels provide
some benefits via clientelistic redistribution of profits. Proponents of small scale “oil
bunkering” in the Niger Deltan context (incorporating both legal and nominally illegal
“oil theft”) may be understood as exercising direct resource control over the hydrocarbons
in their land, although this action exists in parallel, and at time intersects, with activities
conducted through the collaboration, and/or to the benefit, of state and corporate elites
(Ikanone et al., 2014). In contrast, the upswing in oil theft in Mexico over the past decade is
imbricated in the inter-relationship between members of State agencies—including security
forces—and organized crime, and offers a pretext for the state security agencies’ impunity
for their role in human rights violations. Yet in Mexico, historically, protests against the oil
industry were tolerated by the state as part of broader corporatist dynamics. Here, state
34 EPE: Nature and Space 0(0)
government would employ compensation and clientelist payments to quell opposition. In
Canada increasing cases of “sabotage” against industry have on occasion been deliberately
staged by security agencies to entrap local industrial opponents,
7
but have received limited
global and national attention (Zalik, 2011), except in the context of national “counter-
terrorism.”
In all three cases, industry has benefited from a wider context of limited economic invest-
ment in non-hydrocarbon activities; greater development of other productive industries
would ultimately increase the amount of compensation required in case of spills and acci-
dents. Small scale and subsistence-oriented fishing and some agriculture, however, has co-
existed with the oil and gas industry but its relationship with that industry has over-time
developed various forms of co-dependency. For instance, seasonal agrarian occupations and
“local security contracts” from the oil industry sometimes subsidize one another, creating
relationships that make critique of the ecological impacts on rural livelihoods locally com-
plex and contested (see Havice, this collection).
8
In particular, the relationship between the
oil industry and physical violence has shifted over time, yet the “enclave nature” of oil
industry operations has allowed its extractive operations to exist even in conflict zones
(see Valdivia and Lu, this collection). Indeed, such violence may have become functional
to the oil industry in that reports of violence near sources of supply prompt increases in oil
prices on global markets (Nitzan and Bichler, 2004; Zalik, 2004).
In 2004, I published an article that cited directly from formerly classified correspondence
between the British High Commission in Luanda, Angola and the Foreign and
Commonwealth Office in London concerning Shell’s complicity in gun-running to the
Biafran army during the Nigerian civil war. Such sales should have been forbidden by
Shell and the British government who supported the Nigerian federal forces; their complicity
in this action exemplified war profiteering on the ground (Zalik, 2004). Upon return to the
UK Kew Archives two years later, I found the original files disorganized and no longer
searchable by key word, which seemed deliberate. When I inquired at the archivist’s desk, I
was told to use the box number I had located in my previous research to trace the files since
the files had been de-indexed. My colleague Ike Okonta indicated that he had found all the
civil war files in disorder during a visit in the same period. Upon explaining to a senior
archivist that certain files pertaining to Shell’s activities during the Nigerian civil war
appeared to have been de-indexed, that archivist asked me for information on their contents.
I explained that the documents revealed Shell and the British government’s complicity in
gun-running to the forces they opposed during the Biafran war. The archivist said to me “I
suggest you go back upstairs and make a copy of every piece of paper in that box.” Naively,
I asked: “you mean you don’t think this is a coincidence?”. “Oh no, I don’t think it’s a
coincidence.” I inquired further: “This has happened before?”. She replied “oh yes dear,
during the Falklands war.” With regard to representation of the oil industry’s role, this
archival “gap,” or direct occlusion of archival material (see Mollett, this collection), influ-
ences subsequent studies of the Nigerian civil war and interpretations of the relationship
between that war, the oil industry and broader imperial relations. Yet despite various
witnessings of violence and/or the availability of arms, I have sought to largely downplay
violence as a feature of my experience in the field because of its implications for represen-
tational politics, in particular for sensationalizing the region and my fieldwork.
On a 2006 trip to the Niger Delta, while a post-doctoral fellow, I was in a community in
Southern Ijaw, Bayelsa Niger Delta State during an armed incursion. This event did not lead
to serious injuries in the community, but did prompt a large-scale evacuation in which I was
caught-up. In the subsequent year, I wrote an early draft of an article on Shell’s Scenarios
publications that departed from this event, as the affected communities—and many others
Johnson et al. 35
which experience similar occurrences—were Shell-impacted locations (some of them desig-
nated as Shell “host communities” in the parlance of the time
9
). And, as previously men-
tioned, oil producers may benefit from upswings in oil prices associated with media coverage
of violence and/or shutdowns at industrial facilities (Zalik, 2004). A year later, upon a
research visit to the Niger Delta during the Nigerian elections, an individual claiming to
be a Canadian freelance journalist—who had, in fact, reached out to me and used my name
as a referral when speaking to a Nigerian activist-threatened me; I have yet to find a single
journalistic article by this individual. Shortly thereafter, following a research trip I took to
Northern Alberta and prior to the upsurge in global activism against Canadian tar sands
extraction, I received a phone message from the Canadian Security Intelligence Services
(CSIS), purportedly with an invitation to speak in their academic outreach program con-
cerning my research in Nigeria; yet Canada had no substantial oil interests in Nigeria at the
time. The CSIS officer who contacted me indicated she was unable to “remember” who had
referred her to me; clearly I declined this invitation. In 2009, days after the early view of an
article I wrote on the Shell’s Scenarios publication was posted to the Geoforum website
(Zalik, 2010), a former Shell staff member sent me an extensive email taking exception to
my suggestion that Shell’s scenarios publications could be read as influencing oil and gas
futures markets. I could only surmise that he was concerned it implied possible market
interference or insider trading. In 2012, my colleague Isaac Asume Osuoka (former
Coordinator of Oilwatch Africa) and I submitted an intervention to a Canadian environ-
mental tribunal on a Shell project on the territory of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation
in Northern Alberta, the Jackpine Mine Expansion. Shell’s Calgary lawyer tried, unsuccess-
fully, to block the Greenpeace Climate Campaigner, Keith Stewart, and ourselves from
participating in the review hearings. While each of these incidents could perhaps have
been the basis for a scholarly intervention or analysis, I have largely left them out of my
writing or they served only as a footnote or vignette in articles pivoting around the critical
political economy of the firm and broader oil and gas industry.
Currently many transnational oil companies, among them Canadian pipeline companies
and Shell, are pursuing entry or dominance into the restructured Mexican energy sector.
Mentors active in anti-imperialist movements surrounding Mexican energy, including the
late Alfredo Penalosa of the Centro Nacional de Estudios de la Energia in Tabasco, have
taught me that studying this industrial restructuring and the further transfer of capital from
global South to North is part of my scholarly responsibility (Galeano, 1997; Girvan 2017/
1976). Indeed, in Canada, attention to what some conceptualize as Canadian imperialism
(Deneault et al., 2008; Gordon and Webber, 2016), or which may alternatively be framed as
the collusion of Canadian capital with extractive projects that benefit transnational and
local capitalist actors (Garrod and MacDonald, 2016; Tijerina, 2017) has grown in recent
years. Yet despite this sense of responsibility, in conducting field research on this topic, I am
confronted with the stark contrast between my ability to travel, and relative comfort in
doing so, and the living conditions facing leaders and members of a community organization
in Southern Veracruz with whom I have worked with since 2004. Such dynamics create
conditions in which making claims for the communities can operate as a form of appropri-
ation. Consequently, representing the communities themselves is something I have avoided.
Rather, I have sought to analyze the activities of the firms or capital blocks whose activities
may be outright dangerous for those who reside within the affected or fenceline community,
and who are in some cases employed by industry, to critique (creating risks for local
residents and their families should they speak out).
Learning from colleagues examining extractive mega-projects via the lens of critical legal
theory and indigenous resurgence (Coulthard, 2014; Dafnos, 2013; Hernandez Cervantes,
36 EPE: Nature and Space 0(0)
2015; Pasternak, 2015) has pushed me further toward a representational approach to indus-
try informed by a sociology of the crimes of the powerful (Bittle, 2012; Nolin and Stephens,
2011; Pearce and Snider, 1995). I have at times wondered about the position of critical
academia in relation to these crimes. In discussing incidents of corporate impunity as
crime, can the basic inequality upon which many academic research relations rest (see
Sultana, this collection), often involving extractive dimensions due to the colonial dynamic
at play in most academic work, be countervailed by counter-hegemonic intent? Taking this
concern further, crucial readings of the way colonial and racial ontologies are reproduced
(Faria and Mollett, 2016; Mollett and Faria, 2013) and parallel knowledges are appropri-
ated or left unacknowledged, point toward the problematic ways in which Western/
Modernist, nominally critical accounts of imperial relations may rush to speak without
sufficient acknowledgement of the indeterminacy and complexity of social relations; on
this problem Cameron (2015) and Todd (2016) have made important contributions.
Thinking about these contributions and reviewing my own writing impels me toward
deeper and constant reflection on specific dilemmas that arise during, and as an outcome
of, fieldwork in sites distant from where I reside. My reflections and experience in the
Canadian, Mexican, and Nigerian settings suggest that one of the contributions critical
scholars of extraction may offer is to extend both analytic and personal connections between
research sites and cases. This requires scholarly work that underlines the parallels between
the activities of private capital and specific corporations in geographically quite distant
locations, pointing out the contradictions and spatial fixes that capital pursues when exploit-
ing spatially and socially divergent regulatory and social contexts. Through reflection and
experience across regions, I have learned the value of fostering direct connections between
groups and individuals one encounters in the field, connections that persist beyond the
researcher’s mediation. Indeed, rather than researcher claiming expertise or acting as gate-
keeper, a sometimes problematic behavior among scholar activists, these connections may
flourish and build solidarity precisely when they become autonomous from academic, and
the individual researcher’s, demands and activities.
Highlights
•The outcome of a workshop in December 2017, this special section offers reflections on
the dilemmas, challenges, and quandaries that scholars broadly within the field of FPE
have faced conducting field research on large-scale extractive/nature-intensive industry.
•The contributions argue that effective research in and of extractive industries requires
multiple positionalities—positionalities that are problematically inflected with colonial
resonances and always shaped by power relations.
•Informed by a range of methodologies including critical feminist geography and anti/
postcolonial theory, the authors offer insight into the methodological choices they have
made and experiences they have confronted.
•In an effort to emphasize the global political economic connections and similarities
surrounding the metabolism of nature in different forms, we bring together work on
“traditional” resources thought of as extractive (e.g. oil) along with non-traditional
resources and their extractive dimensions, such as fishery, agricultural monocultures,
water, and tourism.
Johnson et al. 37
Acknowledgements
The co-editors and contributors wish to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
(SSHRC) of Canada, York Canada 150, and the Faculty of Environmental Studies (York University)
for funding the Mediating (Im)Materialities workshop held at York in December 2017. Our deepest
thanks to Camila Bonifaz and York’s Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean for
administrative and logistical assistance. We would also like to express special thanks to all authors for
their contributions, and Dr. Rhodante Ahlers, Dr. Dayna Scott, and several graduate students for
their participation in the workshop. Much appreciation goes to Dr Leila Harris for her editorial
assistance as well as the three anonymous reviewers who reviewed this collection for EPE. The prep-
aration and publication of this special section also overlapped with the passing of Dr Leslie Wirpsa
whose courageous journalism and scholarship provided an example for much contemporary research
on extractive industry. Conversations one of the co-editors (Zalik) had with Leslie partially inspired
this project; thus we remember her here.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article: The co-editors received financial support from the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada, York Canada 150 fund, and York University.
Notes
1. The term “indigenous” is spelled in both capitalized and non-capitalized form in this collection to
reflect the individual choices of the authors and their preferred spelling.
2. Ng€
abe women are also commonly imagined as “maids” in Bocas. For space limits they are not
discussed (see author, 2017)
3. I use the term emotional labor as the mental labor required to manage anxieties and suffering, not
in the sense of paid labor to manage emotions, such as that necessary of service industry workers.
4. CAMP emerged out of the Americas-wide Initiative to Advance Climate Equity, an alliance of over
50 organizations across the Americas that have campaigns challenging fossil fuel extraction within
culturally and ecologically important areas. This project was funded by the Robert and Patricia
Switzer Foundation Leadership Grant.
5. The CAMP team includes Remington Franklin, Jamie A. Lee, and Megan Mills-Novoa at the
University of Arizona.
6. CAMP collaborated with various organizations and country governments through data sharing
agreements. The Amazon Basin map would not have been possible without extensive mapping of
similar thematic data by RAISG (Amazonian Network of Georeferenced Socio-Environmental
Information).
7. See https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/wiebo-ludwig-injured-in-explosion-1.187895 and https://natio
nalpost.com/news/canada/alberta-counter-terror-unit-set-up-to-protect-the-oil-sands-by-federal-
tories.
8. See Social Action Nigeria reports from 2014 and 2016 at http://saction.org/crude-business-oil-theft-
communities-and-poverty-in-nigeria/ and http://saction.org/nigeria-and-eus-economic-partnership-
agreement-epa-economic-cooperation-or-economic-slavery-2/
9. The host-community model was subsequently replaced by the so-called whole community model,
later implemented by many multi-national in the Niger Delta under the so-called Global
Memorandum of Understanding or GMOU.
38 EPE: Nature and Space 0(0)
References
Abbott D (2006) Disrupting the ‘whiteness’ of fieldwork in geography. Singapore Journal of Tropical
Geography 27(3): 326–341.
Ahlers R and Zwarteveen M (2009) The water question in feminism: Water control and gender
inequities in a neo-liberal era. Gender, Place & Culture 16(4): 409–426
Ahmed S (2004) Cultural Politics of Emotion. London: Routledge.
Ahmed S (2017) Living a Feminist Life. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.
Amadiume I (1987) Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society. London:
Zed Books.
Anthias P (2018) Indigenous peoples and the new extraction: From territorial rights to hydrocarbon
citizenship in the Bolivian Chaco. Latin American Perspectives 45: 136–153.
Baglioni E and Campling L (2017) Natural resource industries as global value chains: Frontiers,
fetishism, labour and the state. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 49(11):
2437–2456.
Bair J and Werner M (2011) Commodity chains and the uneven geographies of global capitalism: A
disarticulations perspective. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 43(5): 988–997.
Bebbington A, Bornschlegl T and Johnson A (2013) Political economies of extractive industry: From
documenting complexity to informing current debates. Development and Change. Introduction to
virtual special issue. September 30 2013 DOI: 10.1111/dech.12057.
Benedikter R, Ku
¨hne K, Benedikter A, et al. (2016) Keep it in the ground. The Paris Agreement and
the renewal of the energy economy: Toward an alternative future for globalized resource policy?
Challenge 59(3): 205–222.
Bennett HL (2007) Writing into a void. Representing slavery and freedom in the narrative of colonial
Spanish America. Social Text 93 25(4): 67–89.
Bestor TC (2000) How Sushi went global. Foreign Policy 121: 54–63.
Bichler S and Nitzan J (2004) Dominant capital and the new wars. In: Assasi, van der Pijl and Wigan
(eds) Contextualizing Global Regulation: Managing Crises After the Imperial Turn. London:
Palgrave. pp.255–327.
Billo E and Hiemstra N (2013) Mediating messiness: Expanding ideas of flexibility, reflexivity, and
embodiment in fieldwork. Gender, Place & Culture 20: 313–328.
Billo E and Mountz A (2016) For institutional ethnography: Geographical approaches to institutions
and the everyday. Progress in Human Geography 40(2): 199–220.
Billo E and Zukowski I (2015) Criminals or citizens? Mining and citizen protest in Correa’s Ecuador.
NACLA. Available at: https://nacla.org/news/2015/11/02/criminals-or-citizens-mining-and-citizen-
protest-correa%E2%80%99s-ecuador (accessed 27 September 2019).
Bittle S (2012) Still dying for a living. Vancouver: UBC Press.
Braudel F (1992 [1979]) The Structures of Everyday Life: The Limits of the Possible. Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press.
Bridge G (2008) Global production networks and the extractive sector: Governing resource-based
development. Journal of Economic Geography 8(3): 389–419.
Bridge G (2009) Material worlds: Natural resources, resource geography and the material economy.
Geography Compass 3: 1217–1244.
Bobrow-Strain A (2007) Intimate Enemies: Landowners, Power, and Violence in Chiapas. Durham, NC
and London: Duke University Press.
Bondi L (2002) Introduction. In: Bondi L, Avis H, Bankey R, et al. (eds) Subjectivities, Knowledges,
and Feminist Geographies: The Subjects and Ethics of Social Research. London: Rowman &
Littlefield, pp. 1–12.
Bourgois P (1989) Ethnicity at Work. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins UEJ.
Bunker SG (1988) Underdeveloping the Amazon: Extraction, Equal Exchange and the Failure of the
Modern State. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Bunker SG and Ciccantell PS (2005) Globalization and the Race for Resources. Baltimore, MD: JHU
Press.
Johnson et al. 39
Cahill C (2007) Repositioning ethical commitments: Participatory action research as a relational praxis
of social change. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 6(3): 360–373.
Cahill C, Sultana F and Pain R (2007) Participatory ethics: Politics, practices, institutions. ACME: An
International Journal for Critical Geographies 6(3): 304–318.
Cameron E (2015) Far off Metal River: Inuit Lands, Settler Stories, and the Making of the
Contemporary Arctic. Vancouver: UBC Press.
Campbell LM, Corson C, Gray NJ, et al. (2014) Studying global environmental meetings to
understand global environmental governance: Collaborative event ethnography at the tenth con-
ference of the parties to the convention on biological diversity. Global Environmental Politics 14(3):
1–20.
Carroll WK and Hackett RA (2006) Democratic media activism through the lens of social movement
theory. Media, Culture & Society 28(1): 83–104.
Hernandez Cervantes A (2015) Cr
ıtica al pluralismo jur
ıdico neoconservador desde la epistemolog
ıa
feminista. Amicus Curiae 12(2): 235–259.
Chacko E (2004) Positionality and praxis: Fieldwork experience in rural India. Singapore Journal of
Tropical Geography 25(1): 51–63.
Cheyns E (2014) Making “minority voices” heard in transnational roundtables: The role of local
NGOs in reintroducing justice and attachments. Agriculture and Human Values 31: 439–453.
Ciccantell P and Smith DA (2009) Rethinking Global Commodity Chains: Integrating Extraction,
Transport, and Manufacturing. International Journal of Comparative Sociology 50(3–4): 361–384.
Couldry N (2008) Mediatization or mediation? Alternative understandings of the emergent space of
digital storytelling. New Media & Society 10(3): 373–391.
Coulthard GS (2014) Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Crenshaw K (1989) Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A black feminist critique of
antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics. University of Chicago Legal
Forum 140: 139–167.
Cresswell T (2010) Towards a politics of mobility. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space
28(1): 17–31.
Curley A (2020) Unsettling Indian Water Settlements: The Little Colorado River, the San Juan River,
and Colonial Enclosures. Antipode. Epub ahead of print 15 April 2019. doi:10.1111/anti.12535
Dafnos T (2013) Pacification and indigenous struggles in Canada. Socialist Studies/E
´tudes Socialistes
9(2): 57–77.
Daigle M and Ram
ırez MM (2019) Decolonial geographies. In: Antipode Editorial Collective (Eds.)
Keywords in Radical Geography: Antipode at 50, pp.78–84.
Davies J and Spencer D (2010) Emotions in the Field: The Psychology and Anthropology of Fieldwork
Experience. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Davis A (1981) Women, Race, & Class. New York and Toronto: Vintage.
De la Cadena M (2015) Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice Across Andean Worlds. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
Deneault A, Abadie D and Sacher W (2008) Noir Canada: Pillage, corruption et criminalit
een
Afrique. Communications 2: 1.
Derickson KD and Routledge P (2015) Resourcing scholar-activism: Collaboration, transformation,
and the production of knowledge. The Professional Geographer 67(1): 1–7.
De Santana Pinho P (2015) The dirty body that cleans: Representations of domestic workers in
Brazilian common sense. Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 13(1): 103–128.
Dyck I (1993) Ethnography: A feminist method? The Canadian Geographer 37(1): 52–57.
Eaton E and Kinchy A (2016) Quiet voices in the fracking debate: Ambivalence, nonmobilization, and
individual action in two extractive communities (Saskatchewan and Pennsylvania). Energy
Research & Social Science 20: 22–30.
Ellingson L (2017) Embodiment in Qualitative Research. London: Taylor & Francis.
England K (1994) Getting personal: Reflexivity, positionality, and feminist research. The Professional
Geographer 46: 80–89.
40 EPE: Nature and Space 0(0)
England K (2002) Interviewing elites: Cautionary tales about researching women managers in
Canada’s banking industry. In: Moss P (ed) Feminist Geography in Practice: Research and
Methods. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, pp. 200–213.
England K (2006) Producing feminist geographies: Theory, methodologies and research strategies. In:
Aitkin S and Valentine G (eds) Approaches to Human Geography. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage,
pp.286–297.
Fabricant N and Gustafson B (2015a) Moving beyond the extractivism debate: Imagining new social
economies. NACLA Report on the Americas 47(4): 40–45.
Fabricant N and Gustafson B (2015b) Revolutionary extractivism in Bolivia: Imagining alternative
world orders from the ground up. North American Congress on Latin America. Available at:
https://nacla.org/news/2015/03/02/revolutionary-extractivism-bolivia (accessed 23 October 2019).
Faria C and Mollett S (2016) Critical feminist reflexivity and the politics of whiteness in the “field”.
Gender, Place and Culture 23(1): 79–93.
Federici S (2004) Caliban and the Witch. New York: Autonomedia.
Fisher KT (2015) Positionality, subjectivity, and race in transnational and transcultural geographical
research. Gender, Place & Culture 22(4): 456–473.
Frank AG (1967) Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America: Historical Studies of Chile and
Brazil. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Fraser N (2016) Contradictions of capital and care. New Left Review 100: 99–117.
Gaceta Nacional de Panama (1994) Ley 8: Promoci
on de las actividades tur
ısticas. No. 22558.
Available at: http://www.atp.gob.pa/archivos/pdf/ley8.pdf.
Gago V and Mezzadra S (2017) A critique of the extractive operations of capital: Toward an expanded
concept of extractivism. Rethinking Marxism 29(4): 574–591.
Galeano E (1997) Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent. New York:
Monthly Review Press.
Garland-Thompson R (2011) Misfits: A Feminist Materialist Disability Concept. Hypatia 26(3): 591–
609.
Garrod J and Macdonald L (2016) Rethinking Canadian mining imperialism in Latin America. In:
Mining in Latin America: Critical Approaches to the New Extraction, pp.100–115.
Gaudry AJ (2011) Insurgent research. Wicazo Sa Review 26(1): 113–136.
Gellert PK (2003) Renegotiating a timber commodity chain: Lessons from Indonesia on the political
construction of global commodity chains. Sociological Forum 18(1): 53–84.
Gereffi G and Korzeniewicz M (1994) Commodity Chains and Global Capitalism. Westport, CT and
London: Praeger.
Girvan N (2017 [1976]) Corporate Imperialism: Conflict and Expropriation. New York: Routledge.
Glass RD and Newman A (2015) Ethical and epistemic dilemmas in knowledge production:
Addressing their intersection in collaborative, community-based research. Theory and Research in
Education 13(1): 23–37.
Goldstein DM (2003) Laughter Out of Place: Race, Class, Violence, and Sexuality in a Rio Shantytown.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Gordon T and Webber JR (2016) Blood of Extraction: Canadian Imperialism in Latin America. Nova
Scotia: Fernwood Publishing.
Griffin PA, Jaffe AM, Lont DH, et al. (2015) Science and the stock market: Investors’ recognition of
unburnable carbon. Energy Economics 52: 1–12.
Guerr
on Montero C (2014) Multicultural tourism, demilitarization, and the process of peace building
in Panama. The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 19(3): 418–440.
Hamilton A, Lewis A, McCoy MA, et al. (2011) Market and Industry Dynamics in the Global Tuna
Supply Chain. Honiara: Pacific Islands Forum Fisheries Agency.
Hanson S (1997) As the world turns: New horizons in feminist geographic methodologies. In: Jones JP,
Nast HJ and Roberts SM (eds) Thresholds in Feminist Geography: Difference, Methodology,
Representation. Lanham, MD and New York: Rowan & Littlefield Publishers Inc, pp. 119–128.
Johnson et al. 41
Harris LM (2009) Gender and emergent water governance: Comparative overview of neoliberalized
natures and gender dimensions of privatization, devolution and marketization. Gender, Place &
Culture 16(4): 387–408.
Hartman S (2016) The belly of the world: A note on Black women’s labors. Souls 18(1): 166–173.
Havice E (2013) Rights-based management in the Western and Central Pacific Ocean tuna fishery:
Economic and environmental change under the Vessel Day Scheme. Marine Policy 42: 259–267.
Havice E (2018) Unsettled sovereignty and the sea: Mobilities and more-than-territorial configurations
of state power. Annals of the American Association of Geographers 1280–1297.
Havice E and Campling L (2017) Where chain governance and environmental governance meet:
Interfirm strategies in the canned tuna global value chain. Economic Geography 93(3): 292–313.
Havice E and Campling L (2018) Corporate Dynamics in the Shelf-Stable Tuna Industry. Honiara:
Pacific Islands Forum Fisheries Agency.
Havice E and Reed K (2012) Fishing for development? Tuna resource access and industrial change in
Papua New Guinea. Journal of Agrarian Change 12(2&3): 413–435.
Hawkins R, Ojeda D, Asher K, et al. (2011) A discussion. Environment and Planning D: Society and
Space 29(2): 237–253.
Himley M (2013) Regularizing extraction in Andean Peru: Mining and social mobilization in an age of
corporate social responsibility. Antipode 45: 394–416.
Huber M (2013) Fueling capitalism: Oil, the regulation approach, and the ecology of capital. Economic
Geography 89: 171–194.
Hyndman J (2001) Towards a feminist geopolitics. The Canadian Geographer/Le G
eographe Canadien
45(2): 210–242.
Ikanone G, et al. (2014) Crude Business: Oil Theft Communities and Poverty in Nigeria. Port Harcourt:
Social Action.
Ingold T (2012) Toward an ecology of materials. Annual Review of Anthropology 41(1): 427–442.
Ireton C (2017) “They are blacks of the caste of black Christians”: Old Christian black blood in the
sixteenth and early seventeenth-century Iberian Atlantic. Hispanic American Historical Review
97(4): 579–612.
Johnson A (2017) Pudrici
on del Cogollo and the (post-)neoliberal ecological fix in Ecuador’s palm oil
industry. Geoforum 80: 13–23.
Johnson A (2019) The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil’s national interpretation process in
Ecuador: ‘Fitting’ global standards into local contexts. Journal of Rural Studies 71: 125–133.
Juris JS (2012) Reflections on #occupy everywhere: Social media, public space, and emerging logics of
aggregation. American Ethnologist 39(2): 259–279.
Kama K (2019) Resource-making controversies: Knowledge, anticipatory politics and economization
of unconventional fossil fuels. Progress in Human Geography. Epub ahead of print 20 February
2019. DOI: 10.1177/0309132519829223.
Kaplinsky R and Morris M (2016) Thinning and thickening: Productive sector policies in the era of
global value chains. The European Journal of Development Research 28(4): 625–645.
Katz C (1994) Playing the field: Questions of fieldwork in geography. The Professional Geographer 46:
67–72.
Katz C (2001) Vagabond capitalism and the necessity of social reproduction. Antipode 33(4): 709–728.
Kelley RD (2017) The rest of us: Rethinking settler and native. American Quarterly 69(2): 267–276.
Kenney-Lazar M (2012) Plantation rubber, land grabbing and social-property transformation in
southern Laos. The Journal of Peasant Studies 39: 1017–1037.
Killoran-McKibbin S and Zalik A (2016) Rethinking the extractive/productive binary under neolib-
eralism. In: Springer S, Birch K and MacLeavy J (eds) The Handbook of Neoliberalism. Oxon and
New York: Routledge, pp.625–636.
Kindon S, Kesby M and Pain R (2009) Participatory action research. In: Kitchin R and Thrift N (eds)
International Encyclopedia of Human Geography. London: Elsevier, pp.90–95.
Kirsch S (2018) Engaged Anthropology: Politics Beyond the Text. Berkeley: University of California.
Kitchin R, Linehan D, O’Callaghan C, et al. (2013) The creation and circulation of public geographies.
Dialogues in Human Geography 3(1): 96–102.
42 EPE: Nature and Space 0(0)
Kobayashi A (1994) Coloring the field: Gender, “race,” and the politics of fieldwork. The Professional
Geographer 46: 73–80.
Kobayashi A (2003) GPC ten years on: Is self-reflexivity enough? Gender, Place and Culture 10(4):
345–349.
Koffman E and Raghuram P (2015) The value of social reproduction. In: Gendered Migrations and
Global Social Reproduction. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp.180–185.
Kothari U (2002) Feminist and postcolonial challenges to development. In: Kothari U and Minogue
M (eds) Development Theory and Practice: Critical Perspectives. London: Palgrave, pp. 35–51.
Kothari U (2006) An agenda for thinking about ‘race’ in development. Progress in Development
Studies 6(1): 9–23.
Lawson V (2007) Geographies of care and responsibility. Annals of the Association of American
Geographers 97(1): 1–11.
Longhurst R, Ho E and Johnston L (2008) Using ‘the body’ as an ‘instrument of research’: Kimch’i
and Pavlova. Area 40(2): 208–217.
Lozano BR (2010) El feminismo no puede ser uno porque las mujeres somos diversas: Aportes a un
feminismo negro decolonial desde la experiencia de las mujeres negras del Pac
ıfico colombiano.
Revista La Manzana de la Discordia 5(2): 7–24.
Lu F, Valdivia G and Silva NL (2016) Oil, Revolution, and Indigenous Citizenship in Ecuadorian
Amazonia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
McGlade C and Ekins P (2015) The geographical distribution of fossil fuels unused when limiting
global warming to 2 [deg] C. Nature 517(7533): 187–190.
McGuirk P and O’Neill P (2012) Critical geographies with the state: The problem of social vulnera-
bility and the politics of engaged research. Antipode 44: 1374–1394.
Marcus EG (1995) Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography.
Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 95–117.
Marcus EG (2011) Multi-sited ethnography: Five or six things I know about it now. In: Coleman S
and von Hellermann P (eds) Multi-Sited Ethnography: Problems and Possibilities in the
Translocation of Research Methods. New York: Routledge, pp. 16–32.
Mies M (1986) Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of
Labour. London: Zed Books.
Mingorr
ıa S (2018) Violence and visibility in oil palm and sugarcane conflicts: The case of Polochic
Valley, Guatemala. The Journal of Peasant Studies 45: 1314–1340.
Mohammad R (2001) ‘Insiders’ and/or ‘outsiders’: Positionality, theory and praxis. In: Limb M and
Dwyer C (eds) Qualitative Methodologies for Geographers: Issues and Debates. London: Arnold,
pp.101–120.
Mohanty C (1991) Introduction. In: Mohanty C, Russo A and Torres L (eds) Third World Women and
the Politics of Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 1–47.
Mohanty C (1997) Under western eyes: Feminist scholarship and colonial discourses. In: Visvanathan
N, Duggan L, Wiegersma N, et al. (eds) The Women, Gender and Development Reader. London:
Zed Books, pp.79–85.
Mollett S (2017) Irreconcilable differences? A postcolonial intersectional reading of gender, develop-
ment and Human Rights in Latin America. Gender, Place & Culture 24(1): 1–17.
Mollett S (in preparation) The Making of Residential Tourism Space: Land, Servitude and Embodied
Histories in Panama. Social and Cultural Geography.
Mollett S and Faria C (2013) Messing with gender in feminist political ecology. Geoforum 45: 116–125.
Moore JW (2003) The modern world-system as environmental history? Ecology and the rise of cap-
italism. Theory and Society 32: 307–377.
Moss P (2002) Taking on, thinking about, and doing feminist research in geography. In: Moss P (ed)
Feminist Geography in Practice: Research and Methods. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, pp.1–17.
Moss P (2005) A bodily notion of research: Power, difference, and specificity in feminist methodology.
In: Nelson L and Seager J (eds) A Companion to Feminist Geography. Malden, MA: Blackwell
Publishing, pp.41–59.
Johnson et al. 43
Moss P and Teghtsoonian K (2008) Contesting Illness: Processes and Practices. Toronto: University of
Toronto Press.
Mountz A (2004) Embodying the nation-state: Canada’s response to human smuggling. Political
Geography 23(3): 323–345.
Mountz A (2010) Seeking Asylum: Human Smuggling and Bureaucracy at the Border. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Mullings B (1999) Insider or outsider, neither or both: Some dilemmas of interviewing in a cross-
cultural setting. Geoforum 30: 337–350.
Nagar R (2002) Footloose researchers, “traveling” theories, and the politics of transnational feminist
praxis. Gender, Place and Culture 9(2): 179–186.
Nagar R (2014) Muddying the Waters: Coauthoring Feminisms Across Scholarship and Activism.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Nagar R and Shirazi R (2019) Radical Vulnerability. Keywords in Radical Geography: Antipode at 50,
pp.236–242. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119558071.ch44
Nairn K (1999) Embodied fieldwork Journal of Geography 98(6): 272–282.
Nast H (1994) Women in the field: Critical feminist methodologies and theoretical perspectives. The
Professional Geographer 46(1): 54–66.
Nightingale A (2006) The nature of gender: Work, gender, and environment. Environment and
Planning D: Society and Space 24(2): 165–185.
Nightingale AJ (2011) Bounding difference: Intersectionality and the material production of gender,
caste, class and environment in Nepal. Geoforum 42(2): 153–162.
Nolin C and Stephens J (2011) “We have to protect the investors”: ‘Development’ & Canadian mining
companies in Guatemala. Journal of Rural and Community Development 5(3): 37–70.
Osborne TM (2011) Carbon forestry and agrarian change: access and land control in a Mexican
rainforest. The Journal of Peasant Studies 38(4): 859–883.
Osborne T (2015) Tradeoffs in carbon commodification: A political ecology of common property
forest governance. Geoforum 67: 64–77.
Osborne T (2017) Public political ecology: A community of praxis for earth stewardship. Journal of
Political Ecology 24(1): 843–860..
Pain R, Finn M, Bouveng R, et al. (2013) Productive tensions – Engaging geography students in
participatory action research with communities. Journal of Geography in Higher Education 37(1):
28–43.
Parker B (2017) The feminist geographer as Killjoy: Excavating gendered urban power relations.
The Professional Geographer 69(2): 321–328.
Pasternak S (2015) How capitalism will save colonialism: The privatization of reserve lands in Canada.
Antipode 47(1): 179–196.
Pearce F and Snider L (1995) Regulating capitalism. In: Pearce F and Snider L (eds) Corporate Crime:
Contemporary Debates. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, pp.19–47.
Pearson Z and Crane N (2017) The challenge of feminist political geography to state centrism in Latin
American Geography. Journal of Latin American Geography 16(1): 185–193.
Perry K-K (2013) Black Women Against the Land Grab: The Fight for Racial Justice in Brazil.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Peters K, Steinberg P and Stratford E (eds) (2018) Territory Beyond Terra. Maryland: Rowman and
Littlefield International Ltd.
Pike R (1967) Sevillian society in the sixteenth century: Slaves and freedmen. The Hispanic American
Historical Review 47(3): 344–359.
Pulido L (2002) Reflections on a white discipline. The Professional Geographer 54(1): 42–49.
Ratnam C (2019) Listening to difficult stories: Listening as research methodology. Emotion, Space and
Society 31: 18–25.
Rego JL (1932/1966) Menino de Engenho. Rio de Janeiro: Jose Olympio.
Rocheleau DE, Thomas-Slayter BP and Wangari E (1996) Feminist Political Ecology: Global Issues
and Local Experiences. New York: Routledge.
Rodney W (2018 [1972]) How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. London: Verso Trade.
44 EPE: Nature and Space 0(0)
Rose G (1997) Situating knowledges: Positionality, reflexivities and other tactics. Progress in Human
Geography 21(3): 305–20.
Salda~
na-Portillo MJ (2016) Indian Given: Racial Geographies across Mexico and the United States.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Sawyer S (2004) Crude Chronicles: Indigenous Politics, Multinational Oil, and Neoliberalism in Ecuador.
Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.
Schein R (2011) Distinguished historical geography lecture, 2011. Life, liberty and the pursuit of
historical geography. Historical Geography 39: 7–28.
Smith HF (1989) Ring Ding in a Tight Corner: A Case Study of Funding and Organizational Democracy
in Sistren, 1977–1988. Toronto: Women’s Program, ICAE.
Smith LT (2013 [1999]) Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London and
New York: Zed Books Ltd.
Spivak GC (1999) A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present.
Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press.
Steinhauer E (2002) Thoughts on an Indigenous research methodology. Canadian Journal of Native
Education 26(2): 69.
Stoler AL (2016) Duress: Imperial durabilities in our times. Duke University Press.
Sui D and Goodchild M (2011) The convergence of GIS and social media: Challenges for GIScience.
International Journal of Geographical Information Science 25(11): 1737–1748.
Sultana F (2007) Reflexivity, positionality and participatory ethics: Negotiating fieldwork dilemmas in
international research. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 6: 374–385.
Sultana F (2011) Suffering for Water, Suffering from Water: Emotional Geographies of Resource
Access, Control and Conflict. Geoforum 42(2): 163–172.
Sultana F (2015) Emotional Political Ecology. In: Bryant R (ed) The International Handbook of
Political Ecology. London: Edward Elgar, pp 633–645.
Sultana F and Loftus A (2012) The Right to Water: Politics, Governance and Social Struggles. London:
Routledge.
Sundberg J (2003) Masculinist epistemologies and the politics of fieldwork in Latin Americanist
Geography. The Professional Geographer 55(2): 180–190.
Sundberg J (2004) Identities in the making: Conservation, gender and race in the Maya Biosphere
Reserve, Guatemala. Gender, Place & Culture 11(1): 43–66.
Sundberg J (2005) Looking for the critical geographer, or why bodies and geographies matter to the
emergence of critical geographies of Latin America. Geoforum 36(1): 17–28.
Sundberg J (2014) Decolonizing posthumanist geographies. Cultural Geographies 21(1): 33–47.
Tennant JP, Waldner F, Jacques DC, et al. (2016) The academic, economic and societal impacts of
open access: An evidence-based review. F1000Research 5(632): 1–19.
Thampy G (2013) Indigenous Contestations of Shifting Property Regimes: Land Conflicts and the Ngobe
in Bocas del Toro, Panama. Columbus: The Ohio State University.
Thiem CH and Robertson M (2010) Behind enemy lines: Reflections on the practice and production of
oppositional research. Geoforum 41(1): 5–6.
Tijerina S (2017) Canadian official development aid to Latin America: The struggle over the human-
itarian agenda, 1963–1977. Journal of Canadian Studies 51(1): 217–243.
Todd Z (2016) An Indigenous feminist’s take on the ontological turn: ‘Ontology’ is just another word
for colonialism. Journal of Historical Sociology 29(1): 4–22.
Tsing A (2015) The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins.
Princeton; NJ: Princeton University Press.
Valdivia G (2008) Governing relations between people and things: Citizenship, territory, and the
political economy of petroleum in Ecuador. Political Geography 27(4): 456–477.
Valdivia G (2015) The sacrificial zones of “progressive” extraction in Andean Latin America. Latin
America Research Review 50(3): 245–253.
Valdivia G and Lu F (2016) Informe de resultados preliminares: Los impactos de la extracci
on petro-
lera, pol
ıticas regulatorias y pra
´cticas ambientales en Esmeraldas, Ecuador. Estudio NSF 1259049.
Research report for EP Petroecuador, Esmeraldas.
Johnson et al. 45
van Noorloos F (2013) Residential tourism and multiple mobilities: Local citizenship and community
fragmentation in Costa Rica. Sustainability 5(2): 570–589.
Wade P (2013) Articulations of eroticism and race: Domestic service in Latin America. Feminist
Theory 14(2): 187–202.
Warnaars XS (2012) Why be poor when we can be rich? Constructing responsible mining in El Pangui,
Ecuador. Resources Policy 37: 223–232.
West P (2012) From Modern Production to Imagined Primitive: The Social World of Coffee from Papua
New Guinea. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Wheat D (2016) Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570–1640. Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press.
Whitson R (2017) Painting pictures of ourselves: Researcher subjectivity in the practice of feminist
reflexivity The Professional Geographer 69(2): 299–306.
Willems-Braun B (1997) Buried epistemologies: The politics of nature in (post) colonial British
Columbia. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 87: 3–31.
Wolf D (1996) Feminist Dilemmas in Fieldwork. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Wutich A and Ragsdale K (2008) Water insecurity and emotional distress: Coping with supply, access,
and seasonal variability of water in a Bolivian squatter settlement. Social Science & Medicine
67(12): 2116–2125.
Zalik A (2004) The Niger Delta:‘petro violence’ and ‘partnership development.’ Review of African
Political Economy 31(101): 401–424.
Zalik A (2010) Oil ‘futures’: Shell’s Scenarios and the social constitution of the global oil market.
Geoforum 41(4): 553–564.
Zalik A (2011) Protest as Violence in oilfields: The contested representation of profiteering in two
extractive sites. In Feldman S, Geisler c and Menon G (eds.) Accumulating Insecurity: Violence and
Dispossession in the Making of Everday Life. Athens: University of Georgia Press, pp. 261–284.
46 EPE: Nature and Space 0(0)
