Artiga-Purcell co-edits special issue on current politics of natural resource extraction

Alejandro Artiga-Purcell co-edited a special issue of The Extractive Industries and Society, entitled Critical Cultural Political Economy and Extractivism: The Material and the Semiotic Beyond Digging.

The goal of the special issue is to broaden our understanding of extractivism and its role in our societies by a systematic application and testing of a Critical Cultural Political Economy framework (CCPE) to the extractive sector in general, and to specific extractive projects in particular. In the process of expanding the understanding of extractivism’s evolution, the issue also identified limitations to CCPE and conceived of new ways to increase its capacity to make sense of the world.

Alejandro introduced the issue with an article titled “Reimagining the crises of extractivism: Towards a critical cultural political economy of extractivism and beyond.” 

This introduction to the special issue reviews the importance of material-semiotic analyses of extractivism. Weaving together key insights from across the special issue contributors, it emphasizes how such approaches help us re-imagine and forge alternatives to overlapping extractive crises.

Alejandro’s paper, along with many others in the special issue, are available under open access. Find them all here.