Job Talk / Nicholas Denning - The Spirit of Oil and Rights of Nature: Resisting the Resource Logics of Extractivism

Nicholas Carby Denning is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Bryn Mawr College where he teaches courses on “Extractive Violence and Environmental Justice,” “Humans and Non-Humans,” “Transnational Movements Across the Americas,” and “Human Rights and Citizenship in a Global Perspective,” as well as “Introduction to Cultural Anthropology.” He earned his PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago with a certificate in Latin American and Caribbean Studies. His dissertation, Re-Constituting the Nature of the Nation: Biodiversity, Extractivism, and the Rights of Nature in Ecuador, was based on plurinational, multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork conducted across the Ecuadorian Andes and Amazon in collaboration with ecologist NGOs, conservation biologists, and indigenous social movements. His most recent publication is an essay on “Extractivism” in the forthcoming Johns Hopkins Guide to Critical and Cultural Theory. This talk draws from his current book project, Extractive Bio-sovereignties and Imaginations of Post-Oil Futures, which encourages readers to reconsider global ecological crises from the perspective of people resisting extractivism in Ecuador and across the Global South.