Contesting Extractivism: Disability, Environmental Justice, and Pluriversal Futures in the Global South
Convener: Fathurozi
This panel looks at how disability and environmental harm are connected under extractive capitalism in the Global South. We believe that things like mining, big farming, large infrastructure, and mass tourism don’t just change the land and people’s lives they create conditions that make people disabled. This happens through forced moving, pollution, bad air, and breaking down systems of care that support communities. Instead of seeing disability as just a personal problem, we look at how extractive systems use different factors like class, gender, race, indigenous identity, and ability to spread disability and early death. We call this “zones of organized abandonment.”
But this panel doesn’t just talk about people being hurt or things being unavoidable. We focus on the new ideas and actions coming from the communities that are affected. These communities are building a different kind of future, one that is based on a new way of thinking about land, bodies, health, and how everything is connected. They use different ways of knowing, traditional knowledge, and ways of taking care of each other to challenge the way extractive industries work not just with resources, but also with how knowledge is made.
We use different types of research like ethnography, law, history, and other fields to bring together work that puts disabled people, frontline communities, and the natural world at the center of environmental struggles. Our focus includes fighting against mining, climate justice, new laws that connect disability rights with the environment, ways people survive and support each other in dangerous areas, and healing practices from indigenous, spiritual, and community-based sources that go against capitalist ideas of time and development.
We ask: How do extractive projects create and worsen disabling environments, and what ways do communities use to name, record, and fight back against these slow harms?
How do disability rights and environmental justice movements come together, separate, or build unexpected support? How do people imagine and create pluriversal futures through actions that break the idea that humans are separate from nature and instead focus on connection, giving and receiving, and the well-being of all species?
By seeing the Global South as a place where new ideas are created, not just as examples to study, this panel connects directly with the theme of “Pluriversal Futures in a Multipolarising World.”
We show how fighting extractivism leads to different political, legal, and ethical systems that go against Western ideas of development and environmental management. We encourage contributors to think carefully about how they do their research, supporting ways that are helpful, participatory, and include people with disabilities not repeating the same harmful practices that extractive industries use.
Together, we show how centering disability and environmental justice can transform anthropological engagements with multipolarisation, geopolitics, and pluriversality opening pathways toward more just, livable, and relationally accountable futures.