This event is part of the RECET Festival of Historical and Social Sciences "Transformations of Labor".
Event venue: Campus of the University of Vienna („Altes AKH“), festival tent in Hof 1
Position of the tent: https://goo.gl/maps/8FjYQNtdnaUiKCcs6
Roundtable Discussion with Martyna Dominiak (Stand.earth), Nina Đukanović (University of Oxford), and Aaron Kappeler (University of Edinburgh), moderated by Goran Musić (RECET)
In the Anthropocene era, extractivism has become a central concept for analyzing the global economy and ecology. Countries in Latin America, Africa, and Eastern Europe that previously pursued endogenous industrialization now increasingly reorient toward primary commodity exports. This transformation is driven by the expansion of demand for raw materials, the relocation of environmentally harmful industries by developed economies, and intensified global competition for rare minerals. Rather than providing a genuine alternative, “green capitalism” in core economies accelerates the exploitation of both natural resources and labor in peripheral and semi-peripheral regions. Shifting the focus from consumer perspectives, this roundtable examines the experiences of individuals living and working at extraction sites. By centering on their conditions, it demonstrates how labor is deeply intertwined with struggles over land, power, and ecological futures.
Martyna Dominiak leads the Exit Amazon Oil and Gas campaign – a research and indigenous-driven effort to get banks off oil and gas financing in the Amazon. With over ten years of experience in advocacy and organizing, she won fights on EACOP, the Energy Charter Treaty, and EU Elections Disinformation. She is a sociologist from Lodz, Poland. Now based in Barcelona.
Nina Đukanović is a researcher examining the relationship between extractivism, environmental justice, and contested understandings of sustainability and green transition. She holds a PhD from the University of Oxford, with her thesis based on the ethnographic investigation of resistance to lithium mining in Serbia. She also holds a BASc in Arts and Sciences from the University College London and an MPhil in Nature, Society and Environmental Governance from the University of Oxford. She is also a research fellow at the Association for International Affairs (AMO), a Prague-based think-tank where she focuses on the geopolitics of the critical raw materials. She is involved in several international and regional activist networks including an informal collective the Group on Green Extractivism in the Balkans (GGEB).
Aaron Kappeler is Lecturer in the Anthropology of Development at the University of Edinburgh. His research focuses on agrarian reform, natural resource politics, energy, and environmental struggles in Latin America. He has carried out fieldwork in state enterprises and cooperatives across Venezuela. His latest project explores indigenous land tenure and the redistribution of extractive rents.
Goran Musić is a social historian of labor in socialist and post-colonial settings, approaching the field from a broader disciplinary background in Global History, Nationalism Studies, and Political Economy. After earning a PhD degree in History and Civilization from the European University Institute, he held positions at the University of Graz and Central European University. He is the author of Making and Breaking the Yugoslav Working Class: A Story of Two Self-Managed Factories (CEU Press, 2021). His current research advances knowledge about Yugoslavia's 'socialist globalization' through the example of Yugoslav companies in Zambia.
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