Please note that this page continues to be updated with information on the speakers.
Alexander Dunlap is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for Development and the Environment, University of Oslo. His work has critically examined police-military transformations, market-based conservation, wind energy development and extractive projects more generally in both Latin America and Europe. He is the author of two books: Renewing Destruction: Wind Energy Development, Conflict and Resistance in a Latin American Context (2019, Rowman & Littlefield) and (with J. Jakobsen) The Violent Technologies of Extraction: Political Ecology, Critical Agrarian Studies and the Capitalist Worldeater (2020, Palgrave). He has also published in Anarchist Studies, Geopolitics, Journal of Peasant Studies, Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, Political Geography, Journal of Political Ecology, Globalizations, Journal of Genocide Research and more.
Speaking on Wednesday 21st of Oct. at 16.00 (Opening plenary)
Photo credits: Alex Holm
Ali Almoghazy is an early career scholar getting his doctorate at the Political, Societal, and Regional Change programme at the University of Helsinki. His research focuses on the development of central versus peripheral regions, particularly peripheral regions with mono-sectorial economies. He's also worked on the development of the Boomtown Syndrome and its implications on cities based on extractive industries.
Speaking on Thursday 22. Oct. at 10.00 (EEST) at the "Urbanity and Extractivisms" -session.
Anja Nygren is a Professor of Global Development Studies at the University of Helsinki. She is also Adjunct Professor of Environmental Policy at the University of Helsinki and Adjunct Professor of Political Ecology at the University of Tampere. She got her PhD in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Helsinki in 1995. She has worked as a visiting scholar in various international universities, including University of Texas-Austin, USA; University of Missouri-Columbia, USA; University of Florida-Gainesville, USA; University of London (Goldsmith College), UK; University of Wageningen, the Netherlands; University of Copenhagen; Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico; Universidad Autónoma Juárez de Tábasco, Mexico, United Nations’ Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD), Switzerland; and Centro Agronómico Tropical de Investigación y Enseñanza (CATIE), Costa Rica. She is a Member of the Teachers' Academy of the University of Helsinki, which is the Network of Distinguished Teachers in Higher Education.
Speaking on Friday 23rd of Oct. at 13.00 (EEST) at the Global Extractivisms -session
Anna J. Willow is a professor of anthropology at the Ohio State University, USA. An environmental anthropologist who studies how individuals and communities experience and respond to externally imposed resource extractive development, she is the author two books, including Understanding ExtrACTIVISM: Culture and Power in Natural Resource Disputes (Routledge, 2018) and Strong Hearts, Native Lands: The Cultural and Political Landscape of Anishinaabe Anti-Clearcutting Activism (SUNY, 2012). She is also the editor of Anthropology and Activism: New Contexts, New Conversations (Routledge, 2020) and ExtrACTION: Impacts, Engagements, and Alternative Futures (Routledge, 2017). Willow received her PhD in cultural anthropology in from the University of Wisconsin-Madison as well as a Master of Science in natural resources and environment from the University of Michigan.
Speaking on Wednesday 21st of Oct. at 16.00 (opening plenary)
Bhavya Chitranshi is a PhD fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society at the University of Western Sydney. She is co-founder of an indigenous (Kondh) single women's collective, Eka Nari Sanghathan, in India. In close collaboration with the collective, she has been working on questions of gender, sustainable agriculture and postcapitalism, particular to the Kondh context.
Speaking on Thursday 22nd of October at 14.00 (EEST) at the "Transitions to Alternatives" -session.
As a Canada Research Chair-Indigenous Environmental Justice, cross-appointed with Osgoode Hall Law School and the Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, Professor McGregor has been at the forefront of Indigenous environmental justice and Indigenous research theory and practice. Over the years, she has achieved international recognition through her creative and innovative approach using digital and social media to reach Indigenous communities and the public. Her work has been shared through the IEJ project website and UKRI International Collaboration on Indigenous research.
Speaking on Friday 23rd of October at 15-17 (EEST) at the "Indigenous Sovereignty, Modernity Projects and Alternatives" -session.
Eduardo Gudynas is senior researcher at the Latin American Center of Social Ecology, based in Uruguay. His work focuses on environment and development in Latin America, including research, teaching in different universities, and supporting organizations and movements across the continent. Most recent publications include a detailed evaluation of the links between extractivisms, violencia and human rights violations in Bolivia (published in Spanish in 2020) and the next coming Extractivisms; politics, economy and ecology (in press with Fernwood).
Link to Gudynas' personal blog.
Link to Gudynas' publications.
Speaking on Wednesday 21st of Oct. at 16.00 (EEST) (Opening plenary, Roundtable Discussion)
Julie Ann de los Reyes is an economic geographer and postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University. Her PhD, obtained from the University of Manchester, critically examines the process of financialization, as it manifested in the influence of institutional investors in the gold mining industry, and its socio-ecological implications. Currently, she is undertaking research on the dynamics of coal phase-out in East and Southeast Asia, focusing on the role of Japanese investments on the energy trajectory of the region. She is a former ENTITLE (European Network on Political Ecology-ITN) Marie Curie Research Fellow, and previously worked with research and advocacy institutions such as the Transnational Institute and Focus on the Global South.
Speaking on Friday 23rd of Oct. at 13.00 (EEST) at the "Global Extractivisms" -session.
KO:MI is the solo project of Sanna Komi, a musician and a PhD researcher at the University of Helsinki, who uses both research and music as ways to analyse and understand global issues especially related to human-nature relations, oppression and inequalities. Her upcoming second album is themed around the continuation of living and loving during anthropogenic environmental catastrophes. The new songs deal with different emotions from anger to compassion at the face of collective inaction and the structural roots of the current crises, and bring a societally conscious intersectional voice to alternative pop music. Performing live with a looper pedal and effects, KO:MI creates large and evocative soundscapes with just a violin and her voice.
KO:MI on Spotify, Facebook and Instagram
Performing at 18.00 on Wednesday 21st of October.
Through place-based collaboration, conversation and performance, Mirko Nikolić works towards enactments of climate and earth justice. In recent projects, Mirko with various constellations, have been occupied with de-extractivist poetics, healing and regeneration in the waste of colonial-imperialist modernity, and multispecies commoning. This praxis moves transversally between arts and environmental humanities, and materialises in writings, situated performances and cultural organising. Mirko holds a PhD from the University of Westminster, London, and is currently pursuing an art-research postdoc project at Linköping University. (Photo credit: Julius Töyrylä)
Performing on Friday 23rd of Oct. at 10.00
Molly Anderson is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Food Studies at Middlebury College, where she directs the Food Studies Program and teaches several classes. She is interested in transformation to sustainable food systems, particularly pathways to achieving resilience and equity in food systems. She participates in several international and domestic collaborations, including the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems.
As part of the Transitions to Alternatives -session Molly Anderson will be joined by students Cora Kircher, Ivonne Serna, Zoe Grodsky, Leif Taranta, Divya Gudur, Lucy Weiss and Hannah Laga Abram from Middlebury College in talking about transformations and activism at their University. See the student introductions here.
Speaking on Thursday 22. Oct. at 14.00 (EEST) at the "Transitions to Alternatives" -session.
Natacha Bruna is currently a PhD candidate in the International Institute of Social Studies (Erasmus University Rotterdam) on the Political Ecology research group. Her research is about the agrarian change brought up by the intersections of resource grabbing as a result of extractivism and climate change mitigation and adaptation policies in Mozambique. She is currently engaged as a researcher in an independent research institution in Mozambique – Observatório do Meio Rural. Her areas of research include: agrarian political economy, political ecology and extractivism.
Speaking on Friday 23rd of October at 13.00 (EEST)
Nick Couldry is a sociologist of media and culture. He is Professor of Media Communications and Social Theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and from 2017 has been a Faculty Associate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. In fall 2018 he was also a Visiting Professor at MIT. He jointly led, with Clemencia Rodriguez, the chapter on media and communications in the 22 chapter 2018 report of the International Panel on social Progress. He is the author or editor of fourteen books including The Mediated Construction of Reality (with Andreas Hepp, Polity, 2016), Media, Society, World: Social Theory and Digital Media Practice (Polity 2012) and Why Voice Matters (Sage 2010). His latest books are The Costs of Connection and Media: Why It Matters (Polity: October 2019).
Speaking on Thursday 22nd of October at 13-14.30 (EEST) at the "Colonized by Data: The Costs of Connection" -session
Stephen Healy is a geographer and a Senior Research Fellow at the institute for Culture and Society, University of Western Sydney. He is co-author of Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming our Communities with J.K. Gibson-Graham and Jenny Cameron (translated into Korean, Spanish, Finnish with Chinese, Portuguese and Greek nearing completion) and a founding member of the Community Economy Research Network.
Speaking at Thursday 22nd of Oct. at 14.00 (EEST) at the "Transitions to Alternatives" -session.
Ulises Ali Mejías is associate professor of Communication Studies and director of the Institute for Global Engagement at the State University of New York, College at Oswego. He is a media scholar whose work encompasses critical internet studies, network theory and science, philosophy and sociology of technology, and political economy of digital media. He is the author of Off the Network: Disrupting the Digital World (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) and various articles including ‘Disinformation and the Media: The case of Russia and Ukraine’ in Media, Culture and Society (2017, with N. Vokuev), and ‘Liberation Technology and the Arab Spring: From Utopia to Atopia and Beyond’ in Fibreculture (2012). He is the principal investigator in the Algorithm Observatory project.
Speaking on Thursday 22nd of October at 13-14.30 (EEST) at the "Colonized by Data: The Costs of Connection" -session.