Haymarket Presents: Thea Riofrancos on Extraction

Join us for this Haymarket Presents speakers series event, with Thea Riofrancos and activist-historian Gabriel Winant for a conversation on Riofrancos’s new book, Extraction. Co-sponsored by Pilsen Community Books. From the Los Angeles wildfires at the start of last year, to Trump’s recent televised summit with oil executives, evidence has continued to mount that the dominance of fossil fuels, and the catastrophic effects of climate change they continue to accelerate, is not going to be broken anytime soon. Yet the lithium industry is booming, and critical ‘green’ minerals continued to be on the frontlines of geopolitical wrangling. What are we to make of all this? Are we helping to solve the ecological crisis by buying electric cars if their construction necessitates opening hundreds of new mines in the next decade? If zero emission energy remains an urgent global need, how should we navigate these existential dilemmas? Thea Riofrancos and Gabriel Winant will grapple with these questions and consider what a path toward a just and effective green transition could look like. Speakers: Thea Riofrancos is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Providence College, a Strategic Co-Director of the Climate and Community Institute, and a fellow at the Transnational Institute. Previously, she has been an Andrew Carnegie Fellow, a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard, and a Visiting Fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at Notre Dame, as well as holding research positions at institutions in Santiago, Chile and Quito, Ecuador. The author of Resource Radicals and coauthor of A Planet to Win, her articles have appeared in Perspectives on Politics, Cultural Studies, World Politics, and Global Environmental Politics, and her essays in the New York Times, Washington Post, Financial Times, Foreign Policy, The Guardian, n+1, and Jacobin, among other outlets. Gabriel Winant is an associate professor of history at the University of Chicago, a member of the executive council of AAUP/AFT Local 6741, a member of the Dissent editorial board, and author of The Next Shift. Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/live/8Mw5gu4LOasBuy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org