Entwined Futures: Indigeneity, Gender, and the Extractive Industries

Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship

In sites of resource extraction around the world, from the Alberta tar sands to the Niger Delta, gender violence occurs concomitantly with the destruction of non-human environments. How do literature, film and other cultural narrative forms register the connections between these types of violence? Comparatively examining contemporary texts from North America, Latin America, the Marshall Islands and Africa, this project will theorise how histories of colonialism and the global extractive economy intersect to produce these entwined forms of violence.

The study focuses on a range of landscapes and industries through its emphasis on cultural representations of different materials, including oil, uranium, gold, and copper. I will develop an original, comparative methodology to analyse contemporary cultural texts, ranging across literary fiction, poetry, film and new media. In doing so, I will determine how an engagement with Indigenous narratives and worldviews can enable the re-imagining of more equitable futures.