Anja Nygren - How Does Extractivism Impact Frontier Families Over Generations?

This month we are joined by Anja Nygren a professor in Development Studies at the University of Helsinki. She is also a docent of political ecology at University of Tampere in Finland. She has done intensive empirical frontline research in many countries, including Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Mexico. We discuss her first hand experiences seeing the ravages of extractivism on the lives of average people and the environment over her experience living and working in Central America. Anja’s interests lie in social/environmental justice, access to resources, and environmental conflict. She pairs macro scale data, for example satellite data tracking land change, with ethnographic inquiry that captures the lived experience and the impact on livelihoods. Her work intersects with extractivism through oil and the long-term effects of extractive activities on the land and the extraction and resource grabbing which happens at frontiers. She is very interested in the different dimensions of extractivism, especially looking at some of broader definitions of extractivism for example the effects of agroextractivism, green-grabbing, and even the mental or intellectual extractivism that happens in eco-tourism and the pharmacological industry. The role of profit-making is a defining feature of these extractivisms at frontiers. Anja shares with us the different types of frontiers and the different ways extractivism can play out at these frontiers, including commodity, commoditizing, and resource frontiers.  If you are interested in this subject and would like to learn more, Anja welcomes you to contact her. She is happy to send people her publications, recommendations for other reading, and help in connecting to broader networks.  Please visit Anja’s research profile at University of Helsinki, there are links to over 80 publications (the majority of which are open access!) https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/persons/anja-nygren