Presentation short abstract

In Extremadura, Spain, rural communities are being sacrificed for lithium extractivism. Using the feminist concept of phantom possession, the paper shows how they contest extractive entitlements through horizontal, care-based practices and the revival of collective memories of struggle.

Presentation long abstract

This contribution examines conflicts around lithium extraction in Extremadura, Spain, through a feminist political-ecology lens. The hegemonic green transition intensifies pressure to extract so-called critical minerals. Rural territories are increasingly framed as necessary sites of “green sacrifice.” Such narratives enact material dispossession, but also shape whose knowledge, agency, and futures are recognised as legitimate.

To analyse these dynamics, I mobilise the concept "phantom possession" (v. Redecker 2020). Phantom possession describes the afterlife of domination as propertization: historically sedimented entitlement that persists after its institutional bases have eroded. While originally theorised in relation to racialised and gendered domination, I adapt the concept to extractivist and rural politics. It captures how corporations and state actors cultivate a spectral claim to land, livelihoods, and the very possibility of rural populations to imagine their futures. In a region marked by long-standing peripheralization, this intersects with internalised identities of dispensability, producing a terrain in which extractivism appears inevitable and incontestable.

Against this backdrop, the paper explores emergent cracks and contestations. Local communities increasingly challenge extractive entitlements. In prefigurative practices - alternative modes of relating to one another and non-human nature rooted in care, horizontal organising, and the reactivation of memories of peasant struggle - they counter internalised disposability and open space for imagining Extremadura as a “territory of struggle, not sacrifice”.

The paper also reflects on an activist–scholar mapping project that visualises memories of anti-extractivist struggle. The map functions as a humble aid to political subjectivation: making struggles visible and enabling shared narratives of resistance.