Education
Ph.D., Socio-cultural Anthropology, 
															Northwestern University 2009
															BA, Urban Anthropology, 
															Mount Holyoke College, 1999
Professor

Ph.D., Socio-cultural Anthropology, 
															Northwestern University 2009
															BA, Urban Anthropology, 
															Mount Holyoke College, 1999
Latin America (Andes) Political Economy
															Gender
															Race/Ethnicity
															Class
															Social Movements
															Resource Politics
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’s 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—from 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. 
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.