Emily McGiffin - MIASA - Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa

Emily McGiffin is an interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of arts, politics, and environmental justice. She has held research and teaching positions at the University of British Columbia, the University of Edinburgh and York University. Her work is particularly concerned with questions related to environmental degradation, inequality, extractive industries, land and place, and artistic engagement with these themes. Her current research investigates arts and extractivism, with emphasis on the environmental injustices and inequalities within the aluminum supply chain and the role of aluminum in shaping uneven global modernities. McGiffin’s MIASA project considers the social and environmental damages caused by Guinea’s rapidly expanding bauxite industry, and the role of the arts in civil society efforts to mitigate these effects. She is the author of numerous chapters and articles as well as the monograph Of Land, Bones, and Money: Toward a South African Ecopoetics (University of Virginia Press, 2019).

MIASA Project: Environmental Trauma and the Cultural Response: Arts, Extraction, and Democracy in Guinea

McGiffin’s project examines the response of Guinean artists to the country’s extractive sector in order to understand how social and environmental upheavals, past and present, fuel contemporary civil unrest in Guinea and in francophone West Africa more broadly. The protests that have rocked Conakry in recent months as well as repeated terrorist attacks in the broader region point to an urgent need for the international community to better understand West Africa’s neo-colonial present. Her research examines the cultural politics of Guinea’s booming bauxite industry, asking how Guinean performers and literary artists articulate experiences of environmental damage, support social cohesion in the face of poverty and exploitation, and interact with tensions that can erupt into political violence. Her fellowship project is part of a larger monograph project and will involve developing a chapter and journal article.

Institute:
University of British Columbia

Year:
2020/2021