Announcements

Building on the rich scholarship on oil spills, gas flaring, and environmental protest movements, this conference centres on how people have learned to live with the environmental transformations induced by petroleum extraction in the Niger Delta. How did those living around oil wells and pipelines make sense of suffocating air pollution from gas flares and oil spills and the resultant prevalence of chronic respiratory and carcinogenic diseases? Why did some people protest through NGOs and litigations, and some through indigenous means, while others responded by shifting their gardens and livelihoods elsewhere to avoid toxicity?

The deadline for submissions is 26 January 2024.

Agriculture, mining, and large-scale industries initiated in the colonial period have caused persistent and pernicious forms of toxicity. This conference aims to generate an understanding of how these forms of toxicity are carried over into the present as toxic coloniality. Centring on questions of environmental in/justice, agency in the Anthropocene, and unequal relationships between the Global North and the Global South, we ask what toxic coloniality entails.

The deadline for submissions is 15 January 2024.

AFREXTRACT presents a series of four seminars from September to November 2023.

This seminar series reflects on the environmental histories of mining and oil drilling regions in Africa. It also reviews the various sources, such as literature, art and research fields like ethnography, that we can deploy to write these histories.

On 15 and 16 May 2023, the Future Africa Campus of the University of Pretoria will be the scene of the first AFREXTRACT conference. We are bringing together interdisciplinary scholars, artists, and activists interested in questions of environmental change, lived experiences, cultural expressions, and political responses in African localities of resource extraction.