When subjects move out of place: questioning extractivism and mobility within Latin American Political Ecology

Political ecology has emerged as one of the main analytical approaches to the debate on extractivisms in Latin America. As active contributors to this debate, we aim to reflect on the contributions and limitations that Latin American political ecology has supposed for the analysis of extractivism, and in particular of the positions of (indigenous) grassroots subjects. We will question the analytical privilege that is given to conflict, and how this 'conflict-philia' tends to fix abovementioned subjects to a place - both geographically and in terms of their subject position. This is constraining, particularly in cases where the construction of space, nature, and the subjectivities of grassroots actors is traversed by (hi)stories and practices of mobility. Based on ethnographic and spatial studies of three cases of extractive-capitalist dispossession in the Ecuadorian Amazon, we show the need for a dialogue between the fields of Latin American political ecology and the critical geography of mobilities.