Subterranean Matters: Cooperative Mining and Resource Nationalism in Plurinational Bolivia

by Andrea Marston, Ph.D.

In an era of increased state involvement in natural resource governance, members of Bolivia’s “mining cooperatives” are commonly described as thieves of national wealth.

Nevertheless, these small-scale miners won significant influence in Bolivia’s radically restructured Plurinational State. Drawing on ethnographic work with tin mining cooperatives, Subterranean Matters (Duke University Press, 2024) explores the tense coexistence of resource nationalism and plurinationalism in Bolivia.

Centering labor as a site of analysis, the book develops the concept of “material history” to theorize across historical materialism and new materialisms, and specifically to examine how the meanings historically sedimented underground shape cooperative miners’ individual bodies as well as their body politic.

Dr. Andrea Marston is associate professor in the Department of Geography at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Her research examines the political economies and cultural politics of natural resources and energy systems. She is author of Subterranean Matters: Cooperative Mining and Resource Nationalism in Plurinational Bolivia (Duke University Press, 2024), co-editor for the book series Critical Geographies of Latin America and the Caribbean (University of Florida Press), and the first recipient of the Margaret Fitz Simmons Early Career Award in Political Ecology. Her research has appeared in such journals as Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Environmental Humanities and the Journal of Peasant Studies.

Manufacturing Zones, Marinas, and “Order from above”: The marshes of state-private land development around Kampala, Uganda

by Caroline Faria, Ph.D.

"The shores of Lake Victoria in Uganda are a rich and delicate ecological area. It is host to creeks and springs, swamps and wetlands that sustain life in and far beyond the region. 

"In this talk, I draw on ongoing research with collaborators at UT Austin and Makerere University, Uganda. We center one key site where land, water and the political-economies of Ugandan neoliberalism mingle: the Ntabo/ Garuga peninsula and the development of Pearl Marina. 

"This luxury residential development encroaches on and degrades the silted spaces of the marsh, dispossessing local communities; damaging plant, insect and animal life; and foreclosing opportunities to glean medicinal herbs, collect water and catch and trade in fish. A central irony of racio-colonial capitalism and neoliberalism, these publicly accessible resources are all-the-more vital now, given the privatization of health, water and other public goods in the last 40 years. 

"Through archival research on these areas and interviews with urban planners, district politicians, developers and community-members, we trace how other forms of mingling makes this theft possible: faith in foreign investment, elite wealth-capture, “order from above” and residues of colonially grounded ideals of progress and improvement. 

"Part of a larger collaborative project on the feminist political-ecologies of global retail capital, we examine the machinations of contemporary development in and around urban space, the stakes for local communities -- particularly low-income women -- and the socio-environmental impacts on wetland ecologies in Uganda."

Caroline Faria, Ph.D. an associate professor of geography at the University of Texas at Austin, examines 20th- and 21st-century nationalism, development and neoliberal globalization. Her work analyzes the drivers and impacts of these processes and the connections between them, bringing together longstanding and complex bodies of scholarship on each area.

As a feminist geographer, Faria complicates conventional understandings of these dynamics by demonstrating how they are embodied. She employs a feminist “global-intimate” scalar lens to analyze how neoliberalism, nationalism and development are tied to gendered, racialized, classed and sexualized geometries of power; grounded in colonial and postcolonial histories; experienced unevenly; and lived in everyday life. Her research pays particular attention to undertheorized and typically marginalized people and places, especially women and communities in East Africa.

Following the COVID-19 pandemic, as information-technology companies expanded remote work opportunities for their employees, a dramatic increase in foreign remote workers ("digital nomads") moving to Mexico City for extended periods of time has occurred. In collaboration with 06600 Plataforma Vecinal y Observatorio de la Colonia Juárez, Proyecto Juaricua has mapped the swell of Airbnb listings in Mexico City between 2019-2024, particularly in central neighborhood of the Colonia Juárez. 

This project documents a rise of mega hosts that have fueled evictions in central Mexico City, now operating hundreds of units in the city. This example reflects broader patterns of the financialization of housing on a global scale. While "digital" nomads’ often see themselves as transitory, their presence has had a lasting impact, normalizing racialized processes of dispossession that alter the landscapes of the neighborhood. 

In this talk, I explore how housing organizers articulate this phenomenon as blanqueamiento por despojo (whitening by dispossession) to make sense of the modes of displacement and extraction occurring in the city as well as how they enact other, everyday ways to stake claims to the neighborhood. I ask what these notions of blanqueamiento reveal about longer histories of colonial dispossession and territoriality in Mexico and consider how the analytic of cuerpo territorio might deepen theorizations of gentrification.     

Margaret Marietta Ramírez, Ph.D. is the associate director of Chicana/o-Latina/o Studies at Stanford University. She is a feminist urban geographer whose work analyzes how minoritized peoples across North America resist urban dispossession and other injustices through spatial, cultural and artistic practices. She explores these themes across space and scale in her research and teaching, thinking transnationally and intersectionally to understand how cities are contested and spatially remade in the everyday by Latinx, Black and Indigenous communities.  Ramírez’s writings have been published in journals such as Antipode, Society & Space,and Urban Geography as well as in such edited collections  as Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies (2021), Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement & Resistance (2021)\ and Key Thinkers on Space & Place (2024). She leads the SSHRC-funded Proyecto Juaricua. 

Join a panel of alumni and professionals for a night dedicated to kickstarting your career. We'll be meeting in-person rom 5 to 7: p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 4, at the Stuckert Career Center on campus.

We review resumes with a career counselor to help you overhaul yours. Also, make sure to dress professionally to receive a new professional headshot for your LinkedIn profile. Then stay for a panel discussion with alumni from UK GEO and ENS discussing their career path after graduation.

Enjoy light refreshments as you network and learn from others in the field.

More information about the event

NOTE: As a point of information, the parking lot behind the Stuckert Career Center building is available for attendees after 5:00PM. 

The Dr. Pradyumna P. Karan Memorial Lecture Series at the University of Kentucky honors the doctoral program that professor Pradyumna P. (P.P.) Karan launched in 1968.

The recipient of the Dr. Pradyumna P. Karan Memorial Lecture Series in Geography is selected by the graduate students in the Department of Geography at the University of Kentucky to honor the doctoral program that Professor P.P. Karan launched in 1968. Supported by an initial donation by the family of Professor Karan, this memorial lecture series is meant to serve the graduate program and the department in perpetuity.

For more information on the Series itself, please visit: Dr Pradyumna P. Karan Memorial Lecture Series in Geography.

Schedule of Events, Friday, Feb. 13, 2026:

• A Friday afternoon talk by Dr Abdul Aijaz, Indiana University, at 3 p.m. in Gatton B&E 191. Read more about the lecture here.
• A reception at the Commonwealth House of the Gaines Center for the Humanities immediately following the lecture.

The inaugural speaker for the Dr. Pradyumna P. Karan Memorial Lecture is Dr. Abdul Aijaz from the Indiana University!

Factional Ecologies: Environmental Imagination and Hydrosocial Futures in Punjab

by Dr. Abdul Aijaz
 

In this talk, I examine how environmental imagination, political contestation and ecological transformation intersect in the canal-irrigated landscapes of Punjab amid a global environmental crisis. By tracing the competing claims, uneven power relations and fractured visions of ecological futures that shape Punjab’s hydro-social assemblage.

I show how material and narrative infrastructures of development and crisis converge to produce both material ecologies and imaginaries of abundance, scarcity and decline. Reading literary texts, oral histories and everyday narratives alongside archival records and hydrological interventions, I demonstrate how environmental imagination mediates lived experiences of infrastructural power. 

Situating hydro-social futures within these contested imaginaries of place and people, I argue that Punjab’s ecological crisis demands attention to the cultural and political work through which water is rendered legible, governable and morally and materially charged. Using factional ecologies as a conceptual framework, I highlight the plurality of ecologies in struggle, where historical legacies and imaginative practices shape the possibilities of hydro-social futures and environmental justice.

Dr. Abdul Aijaz is a human geographer whose research brings together political ecology, environmental humanities and literary geographies to examine the entanglements of narrative, infrastructure and ecological crisis. He explores how global discourses of climate change are lived, contested and reimagined in the canal colonies of Punjab, Pakistan, an area shaped by the world’s largest contiguous irrigation system and a legacy of colonial hydrological engineering.

The Sound of Feathers: Attentive Living in a World Beyond Ourselves

by Kathryn Gillespie, Ph.D.

From the rustle of a crow’s wings to the cool touch of moss on a stone wall, to the quiet determination of a worm crossing a sidewalk, "The Sound of Feathers" invites readers to notice the small wonders of life all around them. These fleeting details hold surprising truths about humanity’s connection to nature, the complex relationships of care and harm in which we are entangled, our responsibilities to other species and what it means to be fully present in the world. 

Through vivid storytelling and deeply personal reflections, Kathryn Gillespie invites us to slow down, pay attention and think differently about our everyday lives so that we might imagine shared futures of flourishing. She urges us to confront the forces that separate us from the natural world and find more compassionate ways of living in harmony with it. Gillespie reminds us that the quiet, often overlooked moments in life are where the most profound insights and connections begin.

Kathryn Gillespie, Ph.D., is a writer, researcher, and educator. Her research and teaching interests focus on: ethnography and qualitative methods; feminist and multispecies theory and methods; food and agriculture; political economy; critical animal studies; and human-environment relations. Her latest book, The Sound of Feathers: Attentive Living in a World Beyond Ourselves (Duke University Press, 2026) is about the power of attentiveness to build gentler futures with those other animals with whom we share a world. 

She is also the author of The Cow with Ear Tag #1389 (University of Chicago Press, 2018). She has published in numerous scholarly journals and has co-edited three books:

• Vulnerable Witness: The Politics of Grief in the Field (University of California Press, 2018, co-edited with Patricia J. Lopez).
•  Critical Animal Geographies: Politics, Intersections and Hierarchies in a Multispecies World (Routledge, 2015, co-edited with Rosemary-Claire Collard). 
• Economies of Death: Economic Logics of Killable Life and Grievable Death (Routledge, 2015, co-edited with Patricia J. Lopez).

Gillespie was formerly a postdoctoral scholar in applied environment and sustainability studies online master's program at the University of Kentucky, an animal studies postdoctoral fellow at Wesleyan University (2016-2018) and a lecturer at the University of Washington. She has volunteered with Freedom Education Project Puget Sound (a Puget Sound, Washington-based prison education organization), Food Empowerment Project (a food justice organization in Cotati, California) and Pigs Peace Sanctuary (a sanctuary for pigs in Stanwood, Washington). She is vice president of research & strategy for Farm Forward.

This presentation will be held in Zoom in Room 191 Gatton.

Dr. Nick Lally, with the Department of Geography at the University of Kentucky, will be hosting online office hours to answer questions for prospective M.A. and Ph.D. residential graduate students.

Join us via Zoom here!

“The logistics revolution” was not a revolution at all. It was a counterrevolution. Beginning in the 1950s and '60s, multinational corporations facing a period of falling profitability began to experiment with innovations in logistics management and infrastructure that could speed products to their destinations, cut transportation costs and aid the relocation of production to the low-waged Global South. 

As supply chains have sped up and snaked across the Earth in the last half century, turning suburbs, coastal zones and oceans into a network of warehouses stretched across global space, scholars have largely told the history of logistics as a history of increasing efficiency:

• In business literatures, as an objective technological advancement that reduced poverty by facilitating the globalization of industry.
• In Marxian literatures, as a history of firms’ efforts to sidestep economic crisis by expanding the mobility of global supply chains. 

Yet whether critical or celebratory of the logistics revolution, both approaches assume that corporations and states in the Global North are the primary drivers, excluding the agency of Third World actors and their role in these transformations. In The Logistics Counterrevolution, I ask: What does the rise of logistics look like from the vantage of anti-colonial struggle in the Global South? 

Drawing on archival research in Indonesia, Singapore,  the United States and the United Kingdom, I provide an alternative story: Global supply chains acquired their contemporary power not only because of powerful corporate actors or functionalist shifts in capital’s accumulation strategy but also in response to the rising threat of anti-colonial nationalisms and internationalisms in the decolonizing world. 

Approaching the history of logistics from the standpoint of the Global South illuminates a more political reading of supply chains not simply as results of corporate ingenuity or economic structures for smoothing the fast circulation of goods but also as forms of slow violence that produce social, political, and market access to the labor, resources  and geostrategic locations of Asia.

Charmaine Chua is acting associate professor of geography at the University of California, Berkeley. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on political economy, postcolonial development and technological change with a specific interest in how the rise of the logistics industry has reconfigured the contemporary relations between supply chain capitalism, race, and empire. They are currently writing two books: 

• The Logistics Counterrevolution (under contract with University of Minnesota Press).
• How to Beat Amazon: The Struggle of America's New Working Class (co-written with Spencer Cox). 

Her work has been published in Environment and Planning D, the Socialist Register, Theory and Event, Antipode, The Review of International Studies, The Boston Review, The Nation and Jacobin, among other venues. She also co-founded the Marxist Institute of Research, is an editor of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space and serves as the chair of labor organizing at the Council of University of California Faculty Associations. She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including being named a Marguerite Casey Foundation Freedom Scholar in recognition of movement leaders who participate in academia with a demonstrated commitment to supporting social movements.