Teaching extraction and its discontents: a conversation with Anna Zalik

Abstract

Anna Zalik, Associate Professor at York University’s Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change, teaches a course called Extraction and its Discontents: A Social History and Political Economy. The course builds on and extends her work on the politics of industrial extraction in Nigeria, Mexico and Canada, her more recent research on seabed mining, and her writing and reflections on the politics of fieldwork on natural resource extraction. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of an interview she had with Gayatri Menon, editor of the Teaching Commodity Frontiers section, in August 2020.