Short Abstract

How do spirituality and more-than-human relations shape experiences, interpretations and responses to resource extraction in Africa? This panel explores what extraction and African environmentalism might look like when viewed through the multiple worlds that constitute extractive landscapes.

Long Abstract

The industrial scale extraction of oil, minerals and forest resources have transformed environments and lifeworlds of communities across Africa. Resource extraction does not occur in empty wilderness, but within environments composed of multiple worlds of humans, animals, plants, spirits, ancestors and other more-than-human beings. Yet scholarship on resource extraction and environmentalism often privileges the material, technological, economic and political processes through which extraction, environmental transformations and attendant responses unfold. Less visible are the immaterial, spiritual and ontological relations through which people make sense of, live with and respond to extraction and environmental transformations. This panel explores how local understandings of environments as pluriverses of humans, spirits and other more-than-human beings shape place-based meanings of extraction, environmental transformations and environmentalism. Through the lens of “spirituality”, we foreground how extractive processes encounter worlds that exceed techno-scientific and economic logics of commodification, thereby revealing more-than-material varieties of environmentalism. Following Rowe, Zenner, and Sideris (2025), we consider extractive sites as contact zones where spiritual practices and identities are formed and transformed, influencing social norms, ideologies and everyday environmental practices. Moving beyond materialist and universalist understandings of extraction and environmentalism, we ask: What does the environment mean in extractive localities? What do resources such as oil, gold, diamonds mean? How do spirituality and more-than-human relations shape responses to extraction and environmental transformation? What might African environmentalism look like when viewed through the multiple worlds that constitute extractive landscapes? We invite interdisciplinary contributions from political ecology, sociology, environmental humanities and ethnographies across Africa’s diverse extractive contexts.

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