Biographical Notes
Andrea Marston is a human-environment geographer with research and teaching expertise at the intersection of political ecology, political economy, development studies, feminist geography, and science and technology studies. Broadly, her research examines the political economies and cultural politics of natural resource governance and energy systems. Her specific areas of interest include artisanal and small-scale mining; energy transitions and critical minerals; subterranean spaces and geological knowledges; toxic and post-industrial materialities; gold mining and global finance; energy storage and battery manufacturing; and community water governance. Her book, Subterranean Matters: Cooperative Mining and Resource Nationalism in Plurinational Bolivia, will be published with Duke University Press in March 2024.
At the heart of her work is a commitment to showing how capital-letter Political and Economic processes - such as nation-building, commodity trading, monetary policy, geopolitical conflicts, global carbon emission targets, and so on - elicit and are elicited by socio-environmental changes that often take place on radically different spatial scales. For instance, a large central bank's decision to increase its gold reserves to ward against the negative impacts of economic sanctions can contribute to hiking the price of gold, which can in turn spark small-scale and artisanal gold rushes that show up as corporeal accumulations of mercury in surrounding communities. To trace these connections, she engages closely with both Marxian historical materialism and feminist theories of science and materiality. She consider herself an irreverent political economist: She believe that a robust theory of capitalism is indispensable to the study of resource and energy politics, but that capitalism itself is incomprehensible outside histories of colonialism, racism, and sexism, all of which inform contemporary resource economics.
