Samuel J Spiegel
Biographic Data
| ID | 1222406 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Samuel J Spiegel |
| GIVEN NAMES | Samuel J |
| FAMILY NAME | Spiegel |
| SIGNATURE | SPIEGEL S J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Edinburgh |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2163-3512 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 37 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 381 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 37 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Oil blockades and the geopolitics of double standards: Energy imperialism, normalization of coercion and the hierarchy of suffering
Oil blockades can present key moments for interrogating the politics of selectively asserting (il)legality and (im)morality. Some of the most blatant double standards in President Donald Trump's framings of oil blockades, in 2026, were unmissable while his administration blocked shipments of oil and other goods to Cuba in an effort to collapse the Cuban government. In an attempt to shield Americans and their supporters from the hardships the US w…
Displacement, Borders, and Unsettling Narratives: Critical Directions for Higher Education
Uneven Donor Engagement and Fraught Transboundary Conservation Approaches
Mainstream environmental literature has often presented the initiation of transfrontier conservation areas (TFCAs) in southern Africa as progress, obscuring the influences of geopolitics and capitalist power relationships that shape TFCA initiatives. Recognising the need to explore trajectories that threaten the very core of what TFCA approaches, in theory, stand for, we undertook an ethnographic study in the Chimanimani TFCA along the Zimbabwe-M…
Climate disasters, altered migration and pandemic shocks: (Im)mobilities and Interrelated Struggles in a Border Region
Shocks linked to climate disasters are increasingly understood as intertwined with inequities, devastating livelihoods, exacerbating food insecurities and impacting migration economies. Yet there is often a lack of sustained and situated attention to how these – and diverse secondary and tertiary shocks – are experienced in relation to gender and class inequalities, other social differences and underlying forces shaping differentiated mobility-re…
Refugee Policy Amidst Global Shocks: Encampment, Resettlement Barriers and the Search for ‘Durable Solutions’
Global policy commitments to refugee protection are shaped by ever‐growing pressures, from displacements triggered by conflicts, extremism and climate crisis to domestic fear‐based politics. Before the COVID‐19 pandemic, many governments were increasingly embracing exclusionary policies, defying the rights of asylum‐seekers and refugees stalled in protracted camp settlements. While such policies contrast starkly with core principles espoused in t…
The aesthetic turn in border studies: Visual geographies of power, contestation and subversion
In recent years, critical border studies have developed sophisticated concepts and methodologies for exploring the multifaceted spatialities, sociologies and temporalities of contemporary borders. In this article, we consider how the "aesthetic turn" that has gained prominence in the scholarship can further inform thinking in border studies. Specifically, we focus on the role of the visual in the construction as well as subversion of borders, sug…
Gendered social media communication around mining: Patriarchy, diamonds, and seeking feminist solidarity online
Although it is increasingly well-known that mining generates a vast array of gendered impacts, less studied is how women in mining zones have turned to online social media to articulate concerns and mobilise for collective action. This article explores how gendered social media communication has conveyed injustices experienced by women in Zimbabwe’s diamond-mining areas and produced spaces of feminist solidarity in navigating structural violence,…
Cleaning mineral supply chains? Political economies of exploitation and hidden costs of technical fixes
This article examines hidden costs of three prominent mineral supply chain ‘solutions’ that respectively aim to create ‘conflict-free’ minerals, curtail corruption, and reduce mercury pollution. Our analysis underscores the heterogeneous ways in which global capitalism shapes regulatory injustices spanning multiple scales, illustrating how ‘clean’ mineral supply chain schemes can hide inequitable territorial and economic regimes of accumulation a…
Forced displacement: Critical lessons in the protracted aftermath of a flood disaster
Forced displacement and resettlement is a pervasive challenge being contemplated across the social sciences. Scholarly literature, however, often fails to engage complexities of power in understanding socio-environmental interactions in resettlement processes. Addressing Zimbabwe's Tokwe-Mukosi flood disaster resettlement, we explore hegemonic uses of state power during the pre- and post-flood induced resettlement processes. We examine how state …
Fossil fuel violence and visual practices on Indigenous land: Watching, witnessing and resisting settler-colonial injustices
Climate injustice, criminalisation of land protection and anti-colonial solidarity: Courtroom ethnography in an age of fossil fuel violence
As plans for expanding fossil fuel infrastructure continue to ramp up despite threats to the planet, how are geographers to address the criminalisation and prosecution of peaceful acts of defending earth, water and land? Reflecting on a courtroom ethnography and debates spanning legal geography, political ecology and social movements studies, this article explores embodied struggles around oil, ‘justice’ and geographies of caring – discussing how…
Visual Storytelling, Intergenerational Environmental Justice and Indigenous Sovereignty: Exploring Images and Stories amid a Contested Oil Pipeline Project
Visual practices of representing fossil fuel projects are entangled in diverse values and relations that often go underexplored. In Canada, visual media campaigns to aggressively push forward the fossil fuel industry not only relegate to obscurity indigenous values but mask evidence on health impacts as well as the aspirations of those most affected, including indigenous communities whose food sovereignty and stewardship relationship to the land …
Mobility, temporary migration and changing livelihoods in Zimbabwe's artisanal mining sector
This article examines mobility and trans-local livelihood practices linked to artisanal mining, exploring how movement in diverse socio-economic circumstances has profoundly shaped development dynamics in Zimbabwe. Following the fast-track land reforms in Zimbabwe, mobility across resettled large-scale (formerly white-owned) commercial farms created space for reshaping livelihoods across the country, and opened up mineral access to local populati…
Visual Storytelling and Socioenvironmental Change: Images, Photographic Encounters, and Knowledge Construction in Resource Frontiers
Practices of visually representing places of resource extraction and land degradation can be deeply contentious, embedded in a wide variety of values, ethics, goals, and relations. Photographs are pervasively used to generate narratives about environmental change, particular social groups, and places. Yet, the sociocultural processes and power relations at play in producing “visual knowledge” and interpreting images often remain underexplored, wi…
Artisanal Gold Mining and Farming: Livelihood Linkages and Labour Dynamics after Land Reforms in Zimbabwe
While the rural development consequences of Zimbabwe’s Fast Track Land Reform Programme have been heavily debated, there is a dearth of literature focusing on the post-land reform inter-relations between artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) and farming. This article discusses the growing ASGM sector, encapsulated by the phrase ‘mari yaputika’/‘gold has detonated’, examining the impacts of ‘liberating’ mineral resources in farming areas pr…
Traditional leaders and the politics of labour recruitment in Zimbabwe’s platinum mining industry
Coal, Climate Justice, and the Cultural Politics of Energy Transition
In the wake of the Paris Agreement on climate change, promises to phase out coal-fired power have suggested cause for optimism around energy transition globally. However, coal remains entangled with contentious development agendas in many parts of the world, while fossil fuel industries continue to flourish. This article discusses these entanglements through a climate justice lens that engages the cultural politics surrounding coal and energy tra…
Tackling injustices of occupational lung disease acquired in South African mines: Recent developments and ongoing challenges
BACKGROUND: South Africa's mineral resources have produced, and continue to produce, enormous economic wealth; yet decades of colonialism, apartheid, capital flight, and challenges in the neoliberal post-apartheid era have resulted in high rates of occupational lung disease and low rates of compensation for ex-miners and their families. Given growing advocacy and activism of current and former mine workers, initiatives were launched by the South …
Borderland migration, mining and transfrontier conservation: Questions of belonging along the Zimbabwe–Mozambique border
Various critiques of transboundary natural resource governance in southern Africa have questioned the efficacy and social equity dimensions of prevailing strategies for protecting transnational ecosystems, highlighting the importance of sociological research on the potentially ‘other-ing’ impacts of mainstream conservation policy discourse. We draw on research in the Chimanimani Trans-Frontier Conservation Area (TFCA) on both sides of the Zimbabw…
Phasing Out Mercury? Ecological Economics and Indonesia's Small-Scale Gold Mining Sector
This article uses an ecological economics approach to analyse tensions surrounding efforts to phase out mercury in Indonesia's artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) sector, among the largest sources of mercury pollution worldwide. Many scholars and environmental activists have long hoped that global restrictions in mercury trade would drive up mercury prices and decrease mercury use and pollution in ASGM. However, in Indonesia, despite glo…
Decolonising online development studies? Emancipatory aspirations and critical reflections – a case study
Academics in high-income countries are increasingly launching development studies programmes through online distance learning to engage practitioner-students in low-income countries. Are such initiatives providing opportunities to critically tackle social injustice, or merely ‘mirroring’ relations of global inequality and re-entrenching imperial practices? Building on recent scholarship addressing efforts to ‘decolonise development studies’ and t…
EIAs, power and political ecology: Situating resource struggles and the techno-politics of small-scale mining
Academics across disciplines are increasingly employing political ecology lenses to unpack conflicts related to resource extraction. Yet, an area that remains under-researched and under-theorised is how environmental impact assessments (EIAs) are embedded in politics and imagined as sites of power relations. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in Zimbabwe engaging small-scale gold miners, EIA consultants and government officials, this article examines…
Resisting coal: Hydrocarbon politics and assemblages of protest in the UK and Indonesia
This article examines the social and material politics of coal, focusing on mobilizations against opencast mining in the United Kingdom and Indonesia. Contested spaces and practices elicited by coal extraction provide important openings through which to understand how ‘hydrocarbon modernity’ is experienced and entangled with different processes of neoliberal capitalism. We investigate resistance against coal at Ffos-y-Fran in South Wales and the …
Land and ‘space’ for regulating artisanal mining in Cambodia: Visualizing an environmental governance conundrum in contested territory
Extractive industries and poverty: A review of recent findings and linkage mechanisms
EIAs, power and political ecology: Situating resource struggles and the techno-politics of small-scale mining
Academics across disciplines are increasingly employing political ecology lenses to unpack conflicts related to resource extraction. Yet, an area that remains under-researched and under-theorised is how environmental impact assessments (EIAs) are embedded in politics and imagined as sites of power relations. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in Zimbabwe engaging small-scale gold miners, EIA consultants and government officials, this article examines…
Governance Institutions, Resource Rights Regimes, and the Informal Mining Sector: Regulatory Complexities in Indonesia
Shifting Formalization Policies and Recentralizing Power: The Case of Zimbabwe's Artisanal Gold Mining Sector
In the 1990s, government authorities in Zimbabwe introduced internationally praised policies to formalize the artisanal and small-scale mining sector, using a combination of district-administered and nationally administered licensing and capacity-building measures. While “decentralization” efforts in the 1990s and early 2000s were hampered by insufficient resource and power transfers, the model was seen by environmental scholars as a source of op…
Coal, Climate Justice, and the Cultural Politics of Energy Transition
In the wake of the Paris Agreement on climate change, promises to phase out coal-fired power have suggested cause for optimism around energy transition globally. However, coal remains entangled with contentious development agendas in many parts of the world, while fossil fuel industries continue to flourish. This article discusses these entanglements through a climate justice lens that engages the cultural politics surrounding coal and energy tra…
Cleaning mineral supply chains? Political economies of exploitation and hidden costs of technical fixes
This article examines hidden costs of three prominent mineral supply chain ‘solutions’ that respectively aim to create ‘conflict-free’ minerals, curtail corruption, and reduce mercury pollution. Our analysis underscores the heterogeneous ways in which global capitalism shapes regulatory injustices spanning multiple scales, illustrating how ‘clean’ mineral supply chain schemes can hide inequitable territorial and economic regimes of accumulation a…
Resisting coal: Hydrocarbon politics and assemblages of protest in the UK and Indonesia
This article examines the social and material politics of coal, focusing on mobilizations against opencast mining in the United Kingdom and Indonesia. Contested spaces and practices elicited by coal extraction provide important openings through which to understand how ‘hydrocarbon modernity’ is experienced and entangled with different processes of neoliberal capitalism. We investigate resistance against coal at Ffos-y-Fran in South Wales and the …
Phasing Out Mercury? Ecological Economics and Indonesia's Small-Scale Gold Mining Sector
This article uses an ecological economics approach to analyse tensions surrounding efforts to phase out mercury in Indonesia's artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) sector, among the largest sources of mercury pollution worldwide. Many scholars and environmental activists have long hoped that global restrictions in mercury trade would drive up mercury prices and decrease mercury use and pollution in ASGM. However, in Indonesia, despite glo…
Fossil fuel violence and visual practices on Indigenous land: Watching, witnessing and resisting settler-colonial injustices
Contested diamond certification: Reconfiguring global and national interests in Zimbabwe’s Marange fields
Visual Storytelling and Socioenvironmental Change: Images, Photographic Encounters, and Knowledge Construction in Resource Frontiers
Practices of visually representing places of resource extraction and land degradation can be deeply contentious, embedded in a wide variety of values, ethics, goals, and relations. Photographs are pervasively used to generate narratives about environmental change, particular social groups, and places. Yet, the sociocultural processes and power relations at play in producing “visual knowledge” and interpreting images often remain underexplored, wi…
Mobility, temporary migration and changing livelihoods in Zimbabwe's artisanal mining sector
This article examines mobility and trans-local livelihood practices linked to artisanal mining, exploring how movement in diverse socio-economic circumstances has profoundly shaped development dynamics in Zimbabwe. Following the fast-track land reforms in Zimbabwe, mobility across resettled large-scale (formerly white-owned) commercial farms created space for reshaping livelihoods across the country, and opened up mineral access to local populati…
Rural place-making, globalization and the extractive sector: Insights from gold mining areas in Kratie and Ratanakiri, Cambodia
The aesthetic turn in border studies: Visual geographies of power, contestation and subversion
In recent years, critical border studies have developed sophisticated concepts and methodologies for exploring the multifaceted spatialities, sociologies and temporalities of contemporary borders. In this article, we consider how the "aesthetic turn" that has gained prominence in the scholarship can further inform thinking in border studies. Specifically, we focus on the role of the visual in the construction as well as subversion of borders, sug…
Forced displacement: Critical lessons in the protracted aftermath of a flood disaster
Forced displacement and resettlement is a pervasive challenge being contemplated across the social sciences. Scholarly literature, however, often fails to engage complexities of power in understanding socio-environmental interactions in resettlement processes. Addressing Zimbabwe's Tokwe-Mukosi flood disaster resettlement, we explore hegemonic uses of state power during the pre- and post-flood induced resettlement processes. We examine how state …
Land and ‘space’ for regulating artisanal mining in Cambodia: Visualizing an environmental governance conundrum in contested territory
Borderland migration, mining and transfrontier conservation: Questions of belonging along the Zimbabwe–Mozambique border
Various critiques of transboundary natural resource governance in southern Africa have questioned the efficacy and social equity dimensions of prevailing strategies for protecting transnational ecosystems, highlighting the importance of sociological research on the potentially ‘other-ing’ impacts of mainstream conservation policy discourse. We draw on research in the Chimanimani Trans-Frontier Conservation Area (TFCA) on both sides of the Zimbabw…
Climate injustice, criminalisation of land protection and anti-colonial solidarity: Courtroom ethnography in an age of fossil fuel violence
As plans for expanding fossil fuel infrastructure continue to ramp up despite threats to the planet, how are geographers to address the criminalisation and prosecution of peaceful acts of defending earth, water and land? Reflecting on a courtroom ethnography and debates spanning legal geography, political ecology and social movements studies, this article explores embodied struggles around oil, ‘justice’ and geographies of caring – discussing how…
Decolonising online development studies? Emancipatory aspirations and critical reflections – a case study
Academics in high-income countries are increasingly launching development studies programmes through online distance learning to engage practitioner-students in low-income countries. Are such initiatives providing opportunities to critically tackle social injustice, or merely ‘mirroring’ relations of global inequality and re-entrenching imperial practices? Building on recent scholarship addressing efforts to ‘decolonise development studies’ and t…
Mapping Spaces of Environmental Dispute: GIS, Mining, and Surveillance in the Amazon
Recent scholarship has urged increased attention to how advances in geographical information systems (GIS) technology can more equitably help to bridge gaps between the theory and practice of environmental protection and dispute resolution. This study brings new evidence to burgeoning debates in the Amazon, examining how a United Nations (UN) development initiative developed mapping systems in a shifting political climate for environmental govern…
Traditional leaders and the politics of labour recruitment in Zimbabwe’s platinum mining industry
Legacies of a nationwide crackdown in Zimbabwe: Operation Chikorokoza Chaperain gold mining communities
Although conflict in Zimbabwe's diamond mining sector has recently received much international scrutiny, very little research has examined conflict in Zimbabwe's gold mining sector. This article analyses how a nationwide crackdown calledOperation Chikorokoza Chapera('No More Illegal Mining') affected - and 'disciplined' - livelihoods in profound ways in both licensed and unlicensed gold mining regions. Drawing on interviews conducted between 2006…
Climate disasters, altered migration and pandemic shocks: (Im)mobilities and Interrelated Struggles in a Border Region
Shocks linked to climate disasters are increasingly understood as intertwined with inequities, devastating livelihoods, exacerbating food insecurities and impacting migration economies. Yet there is often a lack of sustained and situated attention to how these – and diverse secondary and tertiary shocks – are experienced in relation to gender and class inequalities, other social differences and underlying forces shaping differentiated mobility-re…
Socioeconomic Consequences of Mercury Use and Pollution
In the past, human activities often resulted in mercury releases to the biosphere with little consideration of undesirable consequences for the health of humans and wildlife. This paper outlines the pathways through which humans and wildlife are exposed to mercury. Fish consumption is the major route of exposure to methylmercury. Humans can also receive toxic doses of mercury through inhalation of elevated concentrations of gaseous elemental merc…
Gendered social media communication around mining: Patriarchy, diamonds, and seeking feminist solidarity online
Although it is increasingly well-known that mining generates a vast array of gendered impacts, less studied is how women in mining zones have turned to online social media to articulate concerns and mobilise for collective action. This article explores how gendered social media communication has conveyed injustices experienced by women in Zimbabwe’s diamond-mining areas and produced spaces of feminist solidarity in navigating structural violence,…
China's weapons trade: From Ships of Shame to the Ethics of Global Resistance
China is among the largest exporters of arms to the developing world and is often criticized for exacerbating violent conflicts in Africa. This article examines geopolitical tensions surrounding some of China's most controversial weapons alliances, rethinking the role of the global media, state leaders and non-state actors in forming fragmentary movements of ‘resistance’. Focusing on the tensions around a shipment of Chinese arms to Zimbabwe duri…
Building Capacity in Small-Scale Mining Communities: Health, Ecosystem Sustainability, and the Global Mercury Project
Socioeconomic Consequences of Mercury Use and Pollution
In the past, human activities often resulted in mercury releases to the biosphere with little consideration of undesirable consequences for the health of humans and wildlife. This paper outlines the pathways through which humans and wildlife are exposed to mercury. Fish consumption is the major route of exposure to methylmercury. Humans can also receive toxic doses of mercury through inhalation of elevated concentrations of gaseous elemental merc…
Socioeconomic dimensions of mercury pollution abatement: Engaging artisanal mining communities in Sub-Saharan Africa
Occupational Health, Mercury Exposure, and Environmental Justice: Learning From Experiences in Tanzania
Mercury is a potent neurotoxin that is used by poverty-driven miners to extract gold in more than 50 countries. This article examines efforts of the United Nations to address occupational health and environmental justice amid these challenges, focusing on a 3-year campaign in one of the fastest-growing mining communities in Tanzania. By providing an integrative analysis of environmental health risks, labor practices, public health policies, and d…
China's weapons trade: From Ships of Shame to the Ethics of Global Resistance
China is among the largest exporters of arms to the developing world and is often criticized for exacerbating violent conflicts in Africa. This article examines geopolitical tensions surrounding some of China's most controversial weapons alliances, rethinking the role of the global media, state leaders and non-state actors in forming fragmentary movements of ‘resistance’. Focusing on the tensions around a shipment of Chinese arms to Zimbabwe duri…
Governance Institutions, Resource Rights Regimes, and the Informal Mining Sector: Regulatory Complexities in Indonesia
Mapping Spaces of Environmental Dispute: GIS, Mining, and Surveillance in the Amazon
Recent scholarship has urged increased attention to how advances in geographical information systems (GIS) technology can more equitably help to bridge gaps between the theory and practice of environmental protection and dispute resolution. This study brings new evidence to burgeoning debates in the Amazon, examining how a United Nations (UN) development initiative developed mapping systems in a shifting political climate for environmental govern…
Rural place-making, globalization and the extractive sector: Insights from gold mining areas in Kratie and Ratanakiri, Cambodia
Contested diamond certification: Reconfiguring global and national interests in Zimbabwe’s Marange fields
Legacies of a nationwide crackdown in Zimbabwe: Operation Chikorokoza Chaperain gold mining communities
Although conflict in Zimbabwe's diamond mining sector has recently received much international scrutiny, very little research has examined conflict in Zimbabwe's gold mining sector. This article analyses how a nationwide crackdown calledOperation Chikorokoza Chapera('No More Illegal Mining') affected - and 'disciplined' - livelihoods in profound ways in both licensed and unlicensed gold mining regions. Drawing on interviews conducted between 2006…
Extractive industries and poverty: A review of recent findings and linkage mechanisms
Implications of the Minamata Convention on Mercury for informal gold mining in Sub-Saharan Africa: From global policy debates to grassroots implementation
Shifting Formalization Policies and Recentralizing Power: The Case of Zimbabwe's Artisanal Gold Mining Sector
In the 1990s, government authorities in Zimbabwe introduced internationally praised policies to formalize the artisanal and small-scale mining sector, using a combination of district-administered and nationally administered licensing and capacity-building measures. While “decentralization” efforts in the 1990s and early 2000s were hampered by insufficient resource and power transfers, the model was seen by environmental scholars as a source of op…
Land and ‘space’ for regulating artisanal mining in Cambodia: Visualizing an environmental governance conundrum in contested territory
Phasing Out Mercury? Ecological Economics and Indonesia's Small-Scale Gold Mining Sector
This article uses an ecological economics approach to analyse tensions surrounding efforts to phase out mercury in Indonesia's artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) sector, among the largest sources of mercury pollution worldwide. Many scholars and environmental activists have long hoped that global restrictions in mercury trade would drive up mercury prices and decrease mercury use and pollution in ASGM. However, in Indonesia, despite glo…
Decolonising online development studies? Emancipatory aspirations and critical reflections – a case study
Academics in high-income countries are increasingly launching development studies programmes through online distance learning to engage practitioner-students in low-income countries. Are such initiatives providing opportunities to critically tackle social injustice, or merely ‘mirroring’ relations of global inequality and re-entrenching imperial practices? Building on recent scholarship addressing efforts to ‘decolonise development studies’ and t…
EIAs, power and political ecology: Situating resource struggles and the techno-politics of small-scale mining
Academics across disciplines are increasingly employing political ecology lenses to unpack conflicts related to resource extraction. Yet, an area that remains under-researched and under-theorised is how environmental impact assessments (EIAs) are embedded in politics and imagined as sites of power relations. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in Zimbabwe engaging small-scale gold miners, EIA consultants and government officials, this article examines…
Resisting coal: Hydrocarbon politics and assemblages of protest in the UK and Indonesia
This article examines the social and material politics of coal, focusing on mobilizations against opencast mining in the United Kingdom and Indonesia. Contested spaces and practices elicited by coal extraction provide important openings through which to understand how ‘hydrocarbon modernity’ is experienced and entangled with different processes of neoliberal capitalism. We investigate resistance against coal at Ffos-y-Fran in South Wales and the …
Tackling injustices of occupational lung disease acquired in South African mines: Recent developments and ongoing challenges
BACKGROUND: South Africa's mineral resources have produced, and continue to produce, enormous economic wealth; yet decades of colonialism, apartheid, capital flight, and challenges in the neoliberal post-apartheid era have resulted in high rates of occupational lung disease and low rates of compensation for ex-miners and their families. Given growing advocacy and activism of current and former mine workers, initiatives were launched by the South …
Borderland migration, mining and transfrontier conservation: Questions of belonging along the Zimbabwe–Mozambique border
Various critiques of transboundary natural resource governance in southern Africa have questioned the efficacy and social equity dimensions of prevailing strategies for protecting transnational ecosystems, highlighting the importance of sociological research on the potentially ‘other-ing’ impacts of mainstream conservation policy discourse. We draw on research in the Chimanimani Trans-Frontier Conservation Area (TFCA) on both sides of the Zimbabw…
Artisanal Gold Mining and Farming: Livelihood Linkages and Labour Dynamics after Land Reforms in Zimbabwe
While the rural development consequences of Zimbabwe’s Fast Track Land Reform Programme have been heavily debated, there is a dearth of literature focusing on the post-land reform inter-relations between artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) and farming. This article discusses the growing ASGM sector, encapsulated by the phrase ‘mari yaputika’/‘gold has detonated’, examining the impacts of ‘liberating’ mineral resources in farming areas pr…
Traditional leaders and the politics of labour recruitment in Zimbabwe’s platinum mining industry
Coal, Climate Justice, and the Cultural Politics of Energy Transition
In the wake of the Paris Agreement on climate change, promises to phase out coal-fired power have suggested cause for optimism around energy transition globally. However, coal remains entangled with contentious development agendas in many parts of the world, while fossil fuel industries continue to flourish. This article discusses these entanglements through a climate justice lens that engages the cultural politics surrounding coal and energy tra…
Visual Storytelling, Intergenerational Environmental Justice and Indigenous Sovereignty: Exploring Images and Stories amid a Contested Oil Pipeline Project
Visual practices of representing fossil fuel projects are entangled in diverse values and relations that often go underexplored. In Canada, visual media campaigns to aggressively push forward the fossil fuel industry not only relegate to obscurity indigenous values but mask evidence on health impacts as well as the aspirations of those most affected, including indigenous communities whose food sovereignty and stewardship relationship to the land …
Mobility, temporary migration and changing livelihoods in Zimbabwe's artisanal mining sector
This article examines mobility and trans-local livelihood practices linked to artisanal mining, exploring how movement in diverse socio-economic circumstances has profoundly shaped development dynamics in Zimbabwe. Following the fast-track land reforms in Zimbabwe, mobility across resettled large-scale (formerly white-owned) commercial farms created space for reshaping livelihoods across the country, and opened up mineral access to local populati…
Political science (29 works) · Mining and Resource Management (21 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Geography (18 works) · Law (18 works) · Politics (17 works) · Economics (15 works) · Business (13 works) · Hydropower, Displacement, Environmental Impact (12 works) · Economic growth (11 works)