Extraction is not a metaphor: Decolonial and Black Geographies against the gendered and embodied violence of extractive logics
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract We are witnessing a proliferation of new critical scholarship on the manifold forms of extractivism. Yet, there are risks associated with extraction being rendered a broad metaphor for innumerable forms of removal and value‐making through exploitation and misappropriation. Theorising within decolonial Black feminisms, we respond to the metaphorization of extraction by (re)asserting the need for persistent analysis on the material and embodied effects and consequences of extractivisms. That is, the specific processes, logics, ideologies, and relations of extractivism recast lands, labours, ecosystems, and bodies, and particularly the bodies of women of colour. This helps to ensure the concept does not become figuratively empty and abstracted in politically and analytically debilitating ways. Drawing on more than a decade of research with three communities entangled within and targeted through extractivism along the Chad–Cameroon Oil Pipeline and the extractive‐tourist coastline of Panama, we mobilise a conception of 'extractive logics' to refer to the unnamed, unquestioned, often contradictory, foundational epistemic frameworks that permit the seemingly‐permanent structures and relations of removal, destruction, and dehumanization. We analyse documents from the Chad–Cameroon oil consortium, which projected and then calculated the economic ‘costs’ of the pipeline's triggering of an increase in rates of HIV/AIDS in adjacent towns and cities, alongside the entanglement of capitalist extraction with the medical neglect of Black labourers in Panama. Doing so demystefies the ways that racial and gendered violence are sanctioned (and even premeditated) within extractive logics. We hope that this work challenges some of the methodological nationalism so common within extractive scholarship, and brings extractive processes across disparate South–South and black geographies into conversation, activating a cross‐fertilisation of research across otherwise distinct geographies and geographical refrains. We reflect on the imperatives for and (im)possibilities of decolonial research against extractivism.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it