I am pleased to announce the start of a new collaborative project at Columbia University being run by Zeynep Çelik Alexander and myself under the aegis of the Center for the Study of Social Difference (CSSD). Our project is titled “Extractive Media” and you can find updates on our webpage here.

Questions of resource extraction are now front and center in almost every academic discipline across the humanities and social sciences. Propelled by the urgency of planetary climate crisis, scholars are reinventing their core research questions to ask how we came to this pass, and also where do we go from here?

The Extractive Media working group seeks to take this conversation beyond fossil fuels to track the ways in which energy economies span continents and oceans, differentially affect unequal bodies and lives, and bleed across disparate sites such as the coal mine and the computer screen. We begin with the question of how media forms (print, architecture, photography, cinema, or, more recently, computational media) have historically contributed to material and imaginative modes of extraction, and, further, how we might turn to these very forms to find new possibilities for equitable futures?

Over the course of this project we will organize a mix of faculty reading groups, film screenings, co-taught seminars, and invited talks on themes such as “Energy & Exhaustion,” “Crisis & Recovery,” “Land & Sea,” and “Plantation & Factory.” Please email cssdmedia@columbia.edu if you’d like to join our mailing list.