RESISTING EXTRACTIVISM, PERFORMING OPPOSITION.
Resisting Extractivism, Performing Opposition.
Saturday 2 March 2019
OCAD University, Room 190
This interdisciplinary symposium invites activists, scholars, artists,community organizers, and cultural workers to explore collective strategies of embodied and performed resistance to extractivism. While extractivism commonly refers the logic of reducing nature to commodities, and the resultant hyper-exploitation of the mining, oil, and gas industries, we can also think of extractivism as an ideology fundamental to colonialism and capitalism at their most endemic.
Resisting Extractivism, Performing Opposition asks: How is (anti)extractivism performed? How have mining-impacted communities and solidarity groups alike mobilized their dissent through creative interventions? How can we, as scholars and artists, perform research that does not similarly extract community/Indigenous knowledge for our own cultural capital? How can we ethically and productively engage communities as co-researchers and collaborators without succumbing to an exploitative model of knowledge and labour extraction?
Resisting Extractivism, Performing Opposition explores extractivism as a vital issue that concerns all Canadians: resource extraction informs Canadian domestic and foreign policy, mandatory investments, and is inherent in how we conceptualize Canadian identities, mythologies, and exceptionalism. Canada’s place in the Americas is inherently tied to extractivism, and we will explore this through creative and innovative research methods, mobilized in conversations across disciplines that reach publics outside of the academy, convening artistic, activist, and scholarly communities.
9:30am: Welcome and opening with the Indigenous Environmental Justice Project (York University, Osgoode Hall Law School)
10am: Keynote: Macarena Gómez-Barris, “Living and Dying in Extractive Zones”
11:30am: Lunch catered by NishDish (Room 187; RSVP required)
12:30-2pm: Session One: “Animating Objects, Performing Justice” with Warren Cariou, Dana Prieto & Maggie Flynn; Moderated by Merle Davis
2-2:30pm: Break
2:30-3:45 pm: Session Two: “Legal Discourse as Performative Resistance" with Shandra Spears Bombay, Marion de Vries and Trevor Schwellnus of Aluna Theatre, and Isabel Dávila of the Justice and Corporate Accountability Project; Moderated by Sydney Lang.
3:45pm: Address by Kirsten Francescone (Latin American Coordinator, MiningWatch Canada)
4-4:30pm Break
4:30pm: Keynote: Kirsty Robertson, “When the Land Comes First: Oil, Museums, and (Missing) Protest”
Resisting Extractivism, Performing Opposition was generously supported and made possible by the Canadian Consortium on Performance and Politics in the Americas, York University’s Graduate Program in Theatre and Performance Studies and Sensorium: Centre for Digital Arts and Technology, and OCAD University’s Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences & School of Interdisciplinary Studies, with the support of the Contemporary Art, Design and New Media Art Histories and Criticism and Curatorial Practice graduate programs.
DOWNLOAD “RESISTING EXTRACTIVISM, PERFORMING OPPOSITION” PROGRAM PDF
