AIRE Seminar organized by the stream « Unboxing the Environment »

The Magdalena River, linking Colombia’s Andean interior and Caribbean coast, long served as a conduit for the expansion of colonialism and capitalism in the Americas. Now a state-backed megaproject seeks to transform the waterway into a logistics corridor through a series of engineering works. In this talk, Austin Zeiderman relates the Magdalena’s fraught past and uncertain future to global entanglements of race, nature, and capital. He engages with debates across the social sciences and humanities to examine how racial orders shape ecologies and infrastructures, thereby upholding exploitative relations not only among human populations, but also between people and the planet. The river is now a rich site for examining the regimes of extractivism and inequality that continue to afflict the modern world. 

Speaker

Austin Zeiderman is Professor of Geography at the London School of Economics. He is an interdisciplinary scholar who specializes in the cultural and political dimensions of urbanization and the environment in Latin America and the Caribbean, with a specific focus on Colombia. Motivating this work is a commitment to understanding hierarchical relations among different categories of humans, and how they underpin relations with the non-human world. He is the author of two books–Endangered City: The Politics of Security and Risk in Bogotá and Artery: Racial Ecologies on Colombia’s Magdalena River–both published by Duke University Press.