Thea Riofrancos: Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism

The core of the Agrarian Studies Program’s activities is a weekly colloquium organized around an annual theme. Invited specialists send papers in advance that are the focus of an organized discussion by the faculty and graduate students associated with the colloquium.

This topic embraces, inter alia, the study of mutual perceptions between countryside and city, and patterns of cultural and material exchange, extraction, migration, credit, legal systems, and political order that link them.

It also includes an understanding of how different societies conceive of the spatial order they exhibit. What terms are meaningful and how are they related?: e.g., frontier, wilderness, arable, countryside, city, town, agriculture, commerce, “hills,” lowlands, maritime districts, inland. How have these meanings changed historically and what symbolic and material weight do they bear?

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Thea Riofrancos is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Providence College, an Andrew Carnegie Fellow (2020-2022), and a member of the Climate + Community Project. Her research focuses on resource extraction, renewable energy, climate change, green technology, social movements, and the left in Latin America. These themes are explored in her book, Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador (Duke University Press, 2020), as well as in peer-reviewed articles in Perspectives on Politics, Cultural Studies, World Politics, and Global Environmental Politics (forthcoming), essays that have appeared in outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, The Guardian, n+1, Dissent, Jacobin and NACLA, and in her coauthored book, A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal (Verso Books, 2019).
She is currently writing a book titled Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism, with W.W. Norton.
Previously, she was a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University (2020-2021), a Visiting Researcher at the Nucleo mileno de investigación en energía y sociedad (NUMIES) in Santiago, Chile (2019), a Visiting Fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame (2014-2015), and held a one-year appointment as a Visiting Researcher at the Facultad de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO) in Quito, Ecuador (2011-2012). She received my Ph.D. in political science at the University of Pennsylvania in 2014, and her B.A. from Reed College in 2006.