Circuits of Extractivism and Consumption in Eastern Europe

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel positions Eastern Europe within global circuits of extractivism and consumption. Using interdisciplinary approaches (history, environmental studies, cultural studies) the papers explore Eastern Europe as a site of resource extraction due to deforestation and environmental degradation caused by neoliberal capitalism. Additionally, given its status as an economic semiperiphery, Eastern Europe is a site of “affordable” consumption that can intensify exploitation elsewhere or even cannibalize local resources. Tracking interconnected histories of exploitation and struggle that connect the region with Northern Europe and North and South America, and providing complex histories of environmental and social justice activism both shaped by and resisting these processes, the panel envisions new models of liberation based on reimagined interactions between the human and non-human world.

Sub Unit

• Geography, Urban Studies, Built Environments

Chair

• Ileana Nachescu, Rutgers, The State U of New Jersey

Papers

• Rethinking Liberation against Ecological Disaster: The Destruction of Romanian Old Growth Forests - Ileana Nachescu, Rutgers, The State U of New Jersey

• Coffee versus Chicory in the Habsburg Semiperiphery: Fields of Productive Exploitation - Lea Horvat, U of Jena (Germany)

• Russia’s Environmental and Climate Agenda since the Beginning of the Full-Scale War in Ukraine - Angelina Davydova, Inst for Global Reconstitution

Discussant

• Katarina Kusic, U of Vienna (Austria)

Session Manager

• A. M. LaVey, New York Public Library