Book Talk | Thea Riofrancos | Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism
Join the Institute for Public Knowledge on Friday, September 25 (12:00-1:30 PM) for an event with Thea Riofrancos. She will discuss her new book, Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism, with Leah Aronowsky and Ashley Dawson.
Thea Riofrancos is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Providence College, a Strategic Co-Director of the Climate and Community Institute, and a fellow at the Transnational Institute. Her research focuses on resource extraction, climate change, the energy transition, the global lithium sector, green technologies, social movements, and the Latin American left. These themes are explored in her book, Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador (Duke University Press, 2020), peer-reviewed articles in Perspectives on Politics, Cultural Studies, World Politics, and Global Environmental Politics, essays that have appeared in outlets such as The New York Times, Financial Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, The Guardian, n+1, Dissent, Jacobin and NACLA, and in her coauthored book, A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal (Verso Books, 2019). Previously, she was an Andrew Carnegie Fellow (2020-2023), a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University (2020-2021), a Visiting Researcher at the Nucleo mileno de investigación en energía y sociedad (NUMIES) in Santiago, Chile (2019), a Visiting Fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame (2014-2015), and held a one-year appointment as a Visiting Researcher at the Facultad de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO) in Quito, Ecuador (2011-2012). She received her Ph.D. in political science at the University of Pennsylvania in 2014, and her B.A. from Reed College in 2006.
Leah Aronowsky is a historian of science and an Assistant Professor at the Columbia Climate School. She received a PhD in history of science from Harvard University. Her current book project is a history of climate and energy policy in the late 1970s United States, when early scientific alarmism about global warming collided with policy debates about the energy crisis and the future of fossil fuels. The book looks at why the US ultimately failed to account for the risks of climate change as it attempted to devise long-term policies for achieving energy independence. In 2019 research for this project received the Rachel Carson Prize for the best dissertation in environmental history from the American Society for Environmental History. Aronowsky’s academic writing has appeared in Critical Inquiry, Environmental History, and Environmental Humanities, among other outlets. She also writes essays and reviews about contemporary climate politics in places like The New York Review of Books, The Nation, Public Books, and The Guardian. Before joining the Climate School, Aronowsky was a postdoctoral fellow in the Society of Fellows at Columbia. She received a BA with high honors from Wesleyan University.
Ashley Dawson is Professor of English at the Graduate Center / City University of New York and the College of Staten Island. Recently published books of his focus on key topics in the Environmental Humanities, and include Environmentalism from Below (Haymarket, 2024) and People’s Power: Reclaiming the Energy Commons (O/R, 2020), as well as the essay collection Decolonize Conservation! (Common Notions, 2023). Dawson is a member of the Public Power NY campaign and founder of the Public Power Observatory.