Women’s organizing against extractivism: towards a decolonial multi-sited analysis

In Anglophone geography, proposals have called for the decolonization of geographical knowledge production to be focused on tangible and material manifestations of how dialogue is initiated and mediated among different ontologies and epistemologies. We strive to respond to this call by empirically cutting across the American continent to highlight the embodied and transnational dimensions of natural resource extraction. Across the Americas, extractive industries’ water usage often brings corporations into prolonged conflicts with local communities, who mobilize to resist the initiation and/or expansion of extractive activities that they view as threatening to their health, way of life, and their families and communities’ territories. Through two case studies from West Virginia (WV), USA, and Cuenca, Ecuador, we propose an analytical framework capturing how women organize against the extractive industry as a result of embodied water pollution. We do this with the aim of decolonizing geographical knowledge production, as we propose a decolonial, multi-sited analytical approach, which serves to rethink the scale of effects of extractive industry. By showing how resource extraction affects women’s bodies and water while also effectively allowing us to compare and contrast embodied water relations in WV and Ecuador, we better understand how extractivism works across scales—the body, the environment, and transnationally. We contend that a multi-sited approach disrupts the North–South geographical discursive divide and furthers a decolonial geographical approach in making apparent the embodied production and lived experience of territory across various scales. In this piece, we promote debates on decoloniality within Anglophone geography by proposing that we must not only consider epistemologies and spatial ontologies outside the western canon, but engage with practices and theories occurring in different parts of the globe in a simultaneous fashion as well. We call on fellow geographers to do the same.

Fluid Matters

Water interactions with building materials are addressed for major material groups including natural materials, non-technical ceramics, technical ceramics, metals, polymers, elastomers, and foams. Water quantities and qualities are identified across the life-cycle stages of building materials from sourcing and extraction, manufacturing, construction installation, operation and maintenance, and recyclability. With background information on the water cycle and physiochemistry properties, chemical interactions of building materials are highlighted to demonstrate the range of environmental impacts that building materials have upon water resources. Water consumption metrics are also correlated to the energy footprints of building material production and manufacturing processes. Various water impact calculation methods are referenced, and an overall assessment theorem is introduced for calculating the embodied water footprint of building materials. Example sum totals are indicated for each major material group in a comparative sourcing-to-operation framework.