Don Kingsbury
Biography
Donald Kingsbury is an Assistant Professor (teaching stream) in Political Science and Latin American Studies and the Acting Director of the Munk One Program at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. Don’s research focuses on the politics of resource extraction, energy transitions, and political ecology in our warming world. He has conducted extensive fieldwork throughout Latin America – and more recently, Canada – while building a teaching portfolio that has included, for example, field study with students in the Ecuadorean Amazon on the relationship between petroleum-based development models, democracy, and environmental conservation. Don’s current project focuses on the emerging extractive frontier in lithium and other minerals necessary for decarbonizing technologies, and the ways in which ‘mining for the climate’ departs from and follows familiar and unequal global divisions of risk, affluence, power, and nature. In addition to his academic work, Don is a frequent commentator on Latin American politics in local, national, and international media and has served as an advisor to the government of Canada.
Select publications
Populist Moments and Extractivist States in Venezuela and Ecuador: The People’s Oil? (with Teresa Kramarz). 2021, Palgrave.
Only the People can Save the People: Constituent Power, Revolution, and Counter- Revolution in Venezuela. 2018, SUNY.
Climate Action and Populism of the Left in Ecuador’s Yasuní Initiative (with Teresa Kramarz) Environmental Politics. (2022) Preprint available online.
Energy Transitions in the Shadow of a Dictator: Decarbonizing Neoliberalism and Lithium Extraction in Chile” The Anthropocene Review. (2022) Preprint available online.
Lithium’s Buzz: Extractivism Between Booms in Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile. Cultural Studies. Preprint available online. (2022)
Extractivism and (or after) the Left." Latin American Research Review (2021) 56(4): 977-987.
Combined and Uneven Energy Transitions: Reactive Decarbonization in Cuba and Venezuela (2020) Journal of Political Ecology 27: 558-579
On PetroCaribe: Petropolitics, Energopower, and Post-Neoliberal Development in the Caribbean Energy Region” with Gustav Cedarlöf (2019) Political Geography 72: 124-133.
Populism or Petrostate?: The Afterlives of the Yasuní-ITT Initiative in Ecuador” (with Teresa Kramarz and Kyle Jacques) (2018) Society and Natural Resources 32(5): 530-547.
Infrastructure and Revolt: The Caracas Metro and the ‘Right to the City’ in Venezuela. (2017) Latin American Research Review 52(5): 775-791.
From Populism to Protagonism in Bolivarian Venezuela: Rethinking Laclau’s On Populist Reason” (2016), Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 25(4): 495-514.
Oil’s Colonial Residues: Geopolitics, Identity, and Resistance in Venezuela. Bulletin of Latin American Research 35(4, 2016): 423-436.