撸先生

Biography

Nicole Fabricant is a cultural anthropologist whose research interests focus on the cultural politics of resource wars in Latin America and the US. Her first book Mobilizing Bolivia鈥檚 Displaced Indigenous Politics and the Struggle Over Land homes in on the Landless Peasant Movement (MST-Bolivia) which is 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 takes readers into the personal spaces of home and work, on long bus rides, and into meetings and newly built MST settlements to show how, in response to displacement, Indigenous identity is becoming ever more dynamic and adaptive. In addition to advancing this rich definition of indigeneity, she explores the ways in which Morales has found himself at odds with Indigenous activists and, in so doing, shows that Indigenous people have a far more complex relationship to Morales than is generally understood. She has written about the creative ways in which displaced peoples use and mobilize cultural forms to push for political and economic reforms.
 
Her academic and activist work has transitioned from Latin America to US-based environmental justice. Her work focuses on distinct groups of people come together to build movements for housing/environmental justice. She spent decades fighting alongside South Baltimore Community Land Trust and building a participatory action research class at Benjamin Franklin High School. The product of this movement work was Fighting to Breathe: Race, Toxicity and the Rise of Youth Activism in Baltimore (University of California Press 2022) which looks at the cumulative impacts of industrial stationary toxic facilities in South Baltimore. It follows a dynamic and creative group of high school students who decided to fight back against the race- and class-based health disparities and inequality of industrial expansion. As a Baltimore resident and activist-scholar, Fabricant documents how these young organizers came to envision, design, and create a more just and sustainable future. Fighting to Breathe received the 2024 APLA book prize for best critical ethnography in political anthropology.

She is currently writing a book for University of California Press on the commodification and financialization of rail. She uses rail as a case example or a world in a grain of sand to illustrate what has happened to our most infrastructure and our public goods. The book will explore how and in what ways labor and impacted communities come together to fight for public and democratic control of our rail lines in a moment of right-wing politics.

Her new research examines the political economy of coal (from extraction to export). She documents political campaigns of solidarity and resistance across the entire supply chain from Appalachia to Baltimore of activists organize for a Just Transition from coal. She is currently working on a manuscript on the Need for the Re-nationalization and Electrification of Rail.

Violent Supply Chains: Mapping Coal from Point of Extraction to Export in Baltimore. The primary objective of this research is to investigate the environmental and human health consequences of the entire coal supply chain鈥攆rom points of extraction in Pennsylvania and West Virginia to export sites in Baltimore, particularly Curtis Bay. Most of the deep geographic and ethnographic work will follow and understand the communal harms along the CSX and Norfolk Southern coal trains. This research will analyze the interconnected hazards faced by those living and working near extraction sites, transportation corridors, and export facilities. This project is both geographic and anthropological in nature and will utilize GIS mapping and ethnographic or qualitative methodologies. 

Recent Publications

Books

• 2025. Seize the Rails: The Case for Nationalizing the American Railway (University of California Press, under
  contract June 2025)
• 2012. Mobilizing Bolivia鈥檚 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

• 2025 Who has Coal Fever? The Invisible Violence of Coal Supply Chain from Extraction to Export in the1970s &80s, Antipode, Under Review, November 2025
• 2025 with Daniel Cummings Toxic Landscapes, Toxic Footprints of Eds and Meds: Who bears the burdenof burning biohazardous waste? Environmental History, Under Review, November 2025
• 2023 The Fire that Burns: Personal and Social Biographies that Shape our Political Engagements.
  Practicing Anthropology 45(4): 17-20
• 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.

Recent Essays and Popular Articles

• 2020. with Bret Gustafson, The Fall of Evo Morales, Catalyst 4(1): 105-134
• 2020. with Heather Hax,
• 2019* with Nancy Postero. Indigenous Sovereignty and the New Developmentalism in Plurinational Bolivia. Anthropological Theory, 19(1): 95-119.
• 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.
• 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, 鈥淥pen Veins Revisited: Charting the Social, Economic, and Political Contours of the New Extractivism in Latin America,鈥� Latin American Perspectives 45(5): 4-18.