Dr Nicole Fabricant

Biography

Nicole Fabricant received a BA from Mount Holyoke College in 1999 in urban anthropology and a Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 2009. She completed a presidential post-doc at the University of South Florida in 2010 where she focused on the global water crisis and joined Towson University in the Fall of 2010. Dr. Fabricant's teaching interests include Revolution in Latin America, Resource Wars of the 21st Century, Environmental (In)justice, and Gender and Labor in Latin America.

Broadly speaking, Dr. Fabricant's research interests focus on the cultural politics of resource wars in Latin America. Her first book and early publications  centered on the Landless Peasant Movement (MST-Bolivia) a 50,000-member social movement comprised of displaced peasants, informal laborers, and intellectuals fighting for land redistribution and the revitalization of small-scale farming. She has written about the creative ways in which displaced peoples use and mobilize cultural forms to push for political and economic reforms. Critical reflections on the new politics of resources, territory and identity in Bolivia appear in Remapping Bolivia: Resources, Rights and Territory in a Plurinational State, a co-edited volume with Bret Gustafson from Washington University (SAR Press, 2011).

For the past several years, Dr. Fabricant has been developing a Participatory Action Research (PAR) project that is presently investigating structural injustices in Curtis Bay, South Baltimore. Much of the data collection and analytic work is being conducted by Benjamin Franklin high-school youth alongside Towson University students who are completing their senior capstone in anthropology. One major question has animated this research: Why do communities experience environmental problems and hazards unevenly? Towson University students have assembled small research collectives and worked collaboratively with youth to document the multiple layers of industrial toxicity, and the cumulative effects upon residents’ health and well-being. The PAR project with undergraduates and high-school students feeds directly into her broader research agenda, as we are creatively mapping how environmental hazards lead to political action or inaction during specific historic moments. 

Recent Publications

Books

• 2022. Fighting to Breathe: Race, Toxicity, and the Rise of Youth Activism in Baltimore. University of California Press. 
  
  
• 2012. Mobilizing Bolivia’s Displaced: Indigenous Politics and the Struggle over Land. UNC Press.
  
  
• 2011. w/Bret Gustafson. Remapping Bolivia: Resources, Territory, and Indigeneity in Plurinational Bolivia. SAR Press. 

Recent Articles

• 2020. Teaching Undergraduates about the Human-Environmental Costs of Coal Frontiers:  From the Mountains of Appalachia to the Streets of South Baltimore. In Handbook of Critical Resource Geography, Routledge Press.  Forthcoming
  
  
• 2019. Overburdened Bodies and Lands: Industrial Development and Environmental Injustice in South Baltimore In Baltimore Revisited: Stories of Inequality and Resistance in a US City, Nicole King, Kate Drabinski Rutgers University Press.  
  
  
• 2019. with Mike Fabricant. Cognitive Fractures: How disposable bodies and toxic status quo led to the rise of Trump in Appalachia. Journal of Labor and Society. 22(1): 187-195.        
  
  

• 2019* with Nancy Postero. Indigenous Sovereignty and the New Developmentalism in Plurinational Bolivia. Anthropological Theory, 19(1): 95-119.

• 2019. with Linda Farthing: Open Veins Revisited: The New Extractivism in Latin America, Part 2 Latin American Perspectives 225(46): 4-9 
  
  

• 2018. Introduction with Linda Farthing, “Open Veins Revisited: Charting the Social, Economic, and Political Contours of the New Extractivism in Latin America,” Latin American Perspectives 45(5): 4-18.

Recent Essays and Popular Articles

• 2020. with Bret Gustafson, The Fall of Evo Morales, Catalyst 4(1): 105-134
• 2020. with Heather Hax, The Nation’s First Fair Development Zero Waste Campaign
• 2019. The Roots of the Right-Wing Coup in Bolivia, Dissent December 23, 2019. 
• 2018. with Bret Gustafson. Violence against People, Violence Against Nature NACLA 49(4): 385-386. 
• 2018. with Bret Gustafson Revolutionary Oil: Offshore Drilling in Cuba. NACLA 49(4): 441-443