Mining, Mobility, and Social Change in the Global South (Routledge Studies of the Extractive Industries and Sustainable Development)

This volume focuses on how, why, under what conditions, and with what effects people move across space in relation to mining, asking how a focus on spatial mobility can aid scholars and policymakers in understanding the complex relation between mining and social change.

This collection centers the concept of mobility to address the diversity of mining-related population movements as well as the agency of people engaged in these movements. This volume opens by introducing both the historical context and conceptual tools for analyzing the mining-mobility nexus, followed by case study chapters focusing on three regions with significant histories of mineral extraction and where mining currently plays an important role in socio-economic life: the Andes, Central and West Africa, and Melanesia. Written by authors with expertise in diverse fields, including anthropology, development studies, geography, and history, case study chapters address areas of both large- and smallscale mining. They explore the historical-geographical factors shaping mining-related mobilities, the meanings people attach to these movements, and the relations between people’s mobility practices and the flows of other things put in motion by mining, including capital, ideas, technologies, and toxic contamination. The result is an important volume that provides fresh insights into the social geographies and spatial politics of extraction.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of mining and the extractive industries, spatial politics and geography, mobility and migration, development, and the social and environmental dimensions of natural resources more generally.

Chapter 6 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license

Gerardo Castillo Guzmán is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (PUCP), Peru. He is Coordinator of the Anthropology of the City Research Group at PUCP and Honorary Research Fellow at the Centre for Social Responsibility in Mining at the University of Queensland’s Sustainable Minerals Institute, Australia.

Matthew Himley is Professor of Geography at Illinois State University, USA. He is a nature–society geographer with research interests in the political ecology and political economy of resource industries, especially in the Andean region of South America. He is Co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Critical Resource Geography (Routledge, 2021).

David Brereton is Emeritus Professor at the University of Queensland, Australia, where he was Foundation Director of the Centre for Social Responsibility in Mining. Since retiring from the University in 2016, he has continued to undertake research and advisory work focused on improving corporate social performance in the global mining sector.