Extractive Media: Infrastructures & Aesthetics of Depletion
Project Co-Directors: Zeynep Çelik Alexander and Debashree Mukherjee
Project Coordinator: Hannah Rachel Pivo
A "Hindu laborer" gathers sap from a rubber tree on a plantation in Fiji. Stereograph card published by Keystone View Company, NY, c. 1880.
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?
Readings
Publications
See below a list of recent publications by working group members:
Debashree Mukherjee (2022). Energy and Exhaustion in a Coal Melodrama: Kaala Patthar (1979), in Ecocinema: Theory & Practice II, Eds. Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, Sean Cubitt. Routledge, pp. 52-69.
Zeynep Çelik Alexander, “Nineteenth-Century Alchemy: Mineral Statistics circa 1850,” Perspecta 55 (Spring 2023), pp. 30-43.
Events
Upcoming
Past
