Cultural extractivism and its undoing: Towards socioecological transformations through cultural production

• Critique of cultural production’s entanglement with extractivism. • Insights into culture’s potential for socioecological transformation. • Evidence of the importance of situated research for socioecological transformation. • Laboratory method involving cultural workers. This paper argues that the cultural industries are a key field for research and action in the context of a socioecological crisis because they are simultaneously entangled in extractivist logics and processes and generating models, spaces and narratives for non-extractive socioecological transformation. Adopting a relational approach to extractivism, the paper first discusses the ways in which the cultural industries enhance and reproduce extractivism through dynamics like greenwashing, the cooptation of culture, and growth-oriented development narratives, what can be understood as cultural extractivism. It then argues for the potential that the cultural industries hold for contributing to socioecological transformations in-and-through-culture that move us away from extractivism. To investigate this, the paper draws on empirical research conducted with cultural producers and workers in Argentina, which aimed to understand how they position their work in relation to the socioecological crisis, and to figure out pathways towards forms of cultural production that are situated in local struggles against extractivism. The study identifies new lines of enquiry for researching the potential of cultural production in enacting socioecological transformations, including the decentralization of cultural production, the development of new indicators of success for the sector, questions around the future of the cultural sector as an industry and culture as work, and the relationship between autonomous cultural production and the state. The paper demonstrates the strength of a situated approach to research for unpacking possible avenues of action for socioecological transformations at local scale that can connect with and inform initiatives at a larger scale.