EXALT Podcast

This month we go back to Zambia for an enlightening conversation with Kumbutso Phiri, a development specialist. Kumbutso works with a wide range of topics, but in this conversation, we explore the topic of street kids who live on the streets of Lusaka, Zambia’s capital city. Kumbutso gives us insight into the demographics and societal infrastructure of the street kid population. While the exact nu...

This month on the podcast we are really excited to try something new…by revisiting something old! Christopher and I open the podcast with a short chat and some life updates. Then we turn our attention to one of the first EXALT podcasts, “Exploring the Pluriverse” featuring Maria Ehrnstrom-Fuentes, an associate professor at Hanken School of Business. In this amazing conversation she explores themes...

This month we are delighted to be joined by Patience Mususa from The Nordic Africa Institute. She is an anthropologist with a background in architecture working on mining and urbanization in Southern Africa. She is particularly interested in place and the ways in which people interact in the face of the large scale mining industry and the influence and ramifications of economic downturn and socio-...

This month we are thrilled to be joined by University of Helsinki doctoral researcher Mariam Khawar. Mariam is in the Doctoral Programme in Political, Soci­etal and Regional Change, which is part of the Faculty of Social Sciences and is affiliated with Helsinki Centre for Global Political Economy. Mariam’s work focuses on Islamic economic philosophy, specifically through a Marxist lens. Her work i...

This month we are delighted to be joined by Barış Can Sever who is Ph. D. candidate at the Department of Sociology at Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey. He is currently doing a 9-month research period at Global Development Studies at the University of Helsinki. Barış gives us an exciting insight into the agricultural geography in Turkey, including pressure from changing socio/ecolog...

This month on the pod we are delighted to be joined by Mariko Frame , who is Assistant Professor of Economics at Merrimack College in Massachusetts. Dr. Frame is a political economist who focuses on ecological imperialism, which occurs when one country subjugates another country by controlling the resources, politics, labour, military, and the very ideology or ways of worlding. This dynamic is oft...

This month we are super excited to be joined again by friend of the podcast Alexander Dunlap, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Development and the Environment, University of Oslo. This conversation is a high energy journey through Alexander’s own trajectory into academic spaces, and the realities on the ground he has encountered in the course of his work. We talk about the violence t...

Ksenija Hanaček is a researcher at the Autonomous University of Barcelona’s Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA, UAB), Spain. Ksenija works for the Global Atlas of Environmental Justice (EJAtlas). Recently, she has collaborated with Markus Kröger at the University of Helsinki, looking at extractive projects and resistance to extractive projects in the Arctic. We talked about ex...

This bonus episode of extractivism in pop culture is in honour of the three-year anniversary of the EXALT podcast. We are very excited to be joined again by Jesse Barber from the University of Helsinki Folklore Studies. In this bonus episode we explore J. R. R. Tolkien’s series, Lord of the Rings (LoTR) and how it relates to themes like modernity, industrialism, capitalism, war, and of course extr...

This month on the podcast we are excited to present a conversation that is a bit outside our normal topics! This conversation is with Jesse Barber, a doctoral researcher in Folklore Studies in the Department of Cultures at the University of Helsinki. His research explores the continuity between pre-Christian Scandinavian religions and the folklore written later in Scandinavian countries. He specif...

This month we were delighted to be joined by fellow University of Helsinki, Global Development Studies doctoral researcher, Usman Ashraf. Usman moved from the natural sciences to the social sciences and his research focuses on Chinese investment in Pakistan’s forestry sector. In particular we talked about the Billion Tree Tsunami Afforestation project and the subsequent 10 Billion Tree Tsunami Aff...

This month we are excited to present an in-depth conversation with Professor Sérgio Sauer , who works at University of Brasilia in Brazil and is a visiting scholar at University of Helsinki in Finland. We explored the landscape of land struggles in Brazil and how extractivism and social conflict has shaped Brazil. He started his career on the ground at an agricultural frontier and has worked exten...

This month we were joined by two exciting guests, Syed Mustafa Ali from The Open University in the UK and Dan McQuillan from Goldsmiths, University of London. They are both interested in AI, technology, and applying a critical lens to the development of digital infrastructures and applications. They met at the Histories of AI Seminar at Cambridge University and found common ground through what cou...

This month we are thrilled to be joined by Tim Oakes , who is a Professor of Geography at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is a human, social, and cultural geographer and his research focuses on Southwest China and the techno-political effects of infrastructural urbanism in China’s ‘new area’ urban zones. Needless to say, there have been a lot of developmental changes in China since Tim visi...

This month we are joined by Gediminas Lesutis , a Marie Curie Fellow at University of Amsterdam. This rich and wide-ranging conversation starts with how Gedis got started in fieldwork driven research in Sub-Saharan Africa, and especially in Mozambique. We discussed land-grabbing, precarity, and the destructive, real-life impacts of dispossession in the epicenter of the extractive boom in contempor...

This month we were delighted to be joined on the podcast by Tania Murray Li . Dr. Li is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto (). Her work explores questions of land, labor, class, capitalism, development, resources, and indigeneity. In this episode she gave us insight into her most recent co-authored book, Plantation Life: Corporate Occupation of Indonesia’s Oil Palm Zone , which...

This month we are super excited to be joined by University of Helsinki World Politics professor Teivo Teivainen ( researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/persons/…i-teivainen ). In this vibrant and wide-ranging conversation, we talked with Teivo about his recent turn as a documentary film maker. Teivo has recently been in the Finnish Arctic and in Uruguay traveling along planned railway lines while reflecti...

This month on the EXALT podcast we were joined by Janne Salovaara from the Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies Programme (DENVI) at University of Helsinki. His research looks at the discipline of sustainability science from the perspective of how it is educated at the University level. Janne’s first degree is in graphic design and his idea of design was that it was the path to change the world...

This month the EXALT podcast was delighted to welcome University of Helsinki, Global Development Studies doctoral researcher Anna Marjaana Heikkinen . In her doctorate Anna Marjaana focuses on the role of water and climate change in the Peruvian Andes. She works with communities of peasant farmers, who are trying to hold onto traditional ways of working with their land and water in the face of pre...

This month we were delighted to be joined by Antti Tarvainen, a fellow doctoral candidate in Global Development Studies at University of Helsinki . His work examines the innovation economy (think Steve Jobs, apps, smart everything, etc.) and the colonial violence that that underpins its expansions. We started the discussion talking about the colonial utopia history of California and by extension i...

In honour of the 2-year anniversary of the EXALT podcast we brought back our very first guest, Professor Barry Gills from Global Development Studies at the University of Helsinki . We talk about the development and activities of the EXALT Initiative over the last few years. We touch on how the COVID crisis has raised awareness of the global system as a whole, which has highlighted the impact and k...

In honor of the TWO YEAR ANNIVERSARY (!) of the EXALT Podcast (and also the release of Dune: Part 1 in the US), we decided to do a special bonus episode in a new format! Rather than an interview, Sophia (a Dune neophyte) and Christopher (a self-proclaimed Dune nerd) decided to sit down and talk about the expressions and examples of extractivism(s) in Denis Villeneuve's blockbuster Dune: Part 1. Na...

This month we were very fortunate to be joined by Robin Broad and John Cavanagh. Robin is a professor at the School of International Service at American University and John is a senior advisor and the former director of the Institute for Policy Studies. They joined us to talk about their recent released book The Water Defenders: How Ordinary People Saved a Country From Corporate Greed from Beacon...

In this episode we talk to Victoria Kiechel , a professor from American University. She is an architect and teaches in the School of International Service. Her focus is on the relationship between the built environment and extractivism. This conversation is premised on Victoria’s contribution to the open access book Our Extractive Age (link below). We talk about building as they contribute (or don...

Mira Käkönen is currently a post-doctoral researcher in Global Development Studies at University of Helsinki. She is an environmental social scientist with a focus in political ecology and water infrastructures through the lens of infrastructural politics and the intersection of water and climate. Her work focuses on the Mekong region and the impact of hydropower development. This exciting convers...