Small-Scale and Urban Mining: The Shadow Circuits and Afterlives of Minerals
Call for Papers – Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting
San Francisco, March 29 – April 2, 2016
Organizers:
Cynthia Morinville: Department of Geography and Planning, University of Toronto
Andrea Marston: Geography Department, UC Berkeley
Discussants:
Nancy Lee Peluso: Department of Environment, Science, Policy, and Management, UC Berkeley
Rajyashree Narayanareddy: Department of Geography and Planning, University of Toronto
Mineral extraction, consumption, and disposal are often understood as a unidirectional “chain” leading from the open pit mine to the urban landfill. While such a linear lens can be illuminating when trained on the movement of global capital, it can also obscure the practices that emerge in its shadows – practices that in many ways enable and sustain the primary commodity chain. More specifically, it can obscure “artisanal and small-scale mining” operations (ASM), which are becoming increasingly widespread in countries as diverse as Ghana, Brazil, China, and Indonesia (Tschakert 2009; Veiga and Hinton 2002; Shen and Gunson 2006; Peluso 2015), and the more recently emerging growth of “urban mining,” or the manual search for recyclable metals in electronic waste in countries such as Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, China and India (Lepawsky and McNabb 2010). The number of people involved in both of these livelihood strategies is growing in tandem with the global informalization of labor, the (now flagging) commodity boom, the technification of industrial mining, and ongoing urbanization.
Despite increasing academic interest in small-scale mining, urban mining, and “informal economies” writ large, these practices are usually examined in isolation both from one another and from formal/large-scale economic processes. Such a conceptual framing encourages the reduction of both processes to matters of technological or regulatory debate, with academics and policymakers arrayed along a spectrum that includes those who cautiously celebrate small-scale and urban mining as entrepreneurial or potentially empowering (Oteng-Ababio 2012; Hinton et al. 2003; Noetstaller 1987), those who primarily critique appalling labor conditions and environmental contamination (Williams 2011; Williams et al. 2008; Pucket and Smith 2002; Osibanjo and Nnorom 2007), and those who seek to make these shadow circuits “productive” by encouraging alliances between small-scale and large-scale operators (Reddy 2015).
We will be hosting 1-2 paper sessions that explore some of these shadow circuits and afterlives of mineral (re)extraction. We invite critical approaches to small-scale, urban, and/or informal aspects of mineral extraction taking place in post-closure mines, e-waste sites and landfills, and other shadow spaces of extraction. Particularly compelling would be work that seeks to understand these shadow circuits in relation to metatheories of extraction, production, and consumption – and in relation to one another. Potential paper topics include (but are not limited to):
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Reconceptualizations of small-scale, artisanal, informal and/or urban mining
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Beyond commodity chains: circular economies, cradle to cradle, metabolic flows, etc.
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Small-scale/urban mining relations with large-scale/private/state entities
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Role of development agencies in shaping shadow circuits
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New materialist approaches to metals and minerals
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Forms of expertise (e.g. “appropriate technology,” participatory monitoring programs, etc.)
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Small-scale/urban mining in relation to race, indigeneity, and/or ethnicity
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Post-closure mine politics/the afterlives of mines and metals
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Mines and e-waste sites as ruins
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Discard studies, waste as resources
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Labour politics: precarity, informality, social organization, etc.
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Environmental and social justice
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Post/de-colonial perspectives
Please send abstracts to Cynthia Morinville (cynthia.morinville@mail.utoro