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Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA)
Oral Presentation Session
Jaume Franquesa
Associate Professor
University at Buffalo, SUNY
For the last half century, the region of Southern Catalonia has been targeted for a wide range of energy and hydraulic facilities. In this presentation I will focus on how Southern Catalans have opposed, resisted and contested these projects. This resistance, I argue, helps us discern the environmental dimension of accumulation structures in Spain: the production of space and nature has played a key role in the reconfiguration of the Spanish economy, promoting its financialization and making possible new processes of class consolidation and realignment. Resistance to energy projects in Southern Catalonia operates at two distinct (but not unconnected) organizational scales: organized forms of opposition and everyday forms of resistance. I will rely on the former to show that the mode of accumulation that has dominated the Spanish economy for the last two decades should be understood as an ecological regime; I will rely on the later to show the extent to which the capitalist valorization of nature requires dispossession and the devaluing of local reproductive relations, thus triggering enduring but fragile dynamics of resistance.