Muriel Côte
Biographic Data
| ID | 130005 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Muriel Côte |
| GIVEN NAMES | Muriel |
| FAMILY NAME | Côte |
| SIGNATURE | CÔTE M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Lund University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6359-1627 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 34 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 365 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 34 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
The Invisible Sand: Unpacking Metabolic Flows and Earthly Entanglements in Extended Urbanization
This essay exposes the invisible sand extraction that underpins Copenhagen’s transformation from fishing village to global city, tracing how planetary material flows sustain urban expansion while entangling the city in processes of capital accumulation, class restructuring, and ecological degradation. A science and technology studies (STS) approach from within Marxian political ecology foregrounds how sand functions as both resource and agent: bo…
North–South Relations from a Degrowth Perspective: From Destructive Dependencies to Caring Interdependencies
Research on degrowth has burgeoned in the last 15 years but one of the greatest challenges is its relevance for and potential to build fruitful alliances with the Global South. Articulations of degrowth as an alternative are often associated with nourishing autonomous grassroots initiatives, relocalizing economies, as well as transforming institutions and policies in the Global North. However, this would not in itself bring the much-needed fundam…
Articulating “Responsible” Mining: The Political Work of Incorporating Colombian Artisanal Mining in Gold Supply Chains
Corporations and businesses handling minerals downstream have come under increased pressure to show that the minerals they handle are ‘responsibly’ mined, and a diversity of international standards have emerged to guarantee this. This has been particularly the case for minerals emerging from Artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM), a livelihood that has expanded in the last three decades, but that has come with many environmental and social …
Women ́s organized resistance against extractivism: A systematic review
Artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM): Power and Territorialisation in the Global South. Introduction. Introduction
Orpaillage et genre: Recherche au féminin au Burkina Faso et au Mali
Artisanat minier: Pouvoir et territorialisation dans le Sud Global
Resistance to Extractivism‐Induced Water Insecurity. Does Gender Have a Role in It? A Systematic Scoping Review
Extractivist practices threaten water security and with it, people's health and livelihoods. Numerous communities around the world are engaged in the strenuous work of resistance against mining. Through our previous research, we matured a sense that women are a major force behind organizing for water security, particularly because they often refer to an embodied sense of urgency to act against ongoing extractivism to preserve their waters and ter…
What does being a scholar-activist imply: An interview with Vasna Ramasar by Muriel Côte
Muriel Côte (MC). Good afternoon to you Vasna Ramasar, and thank you for agreeing to share your experience as an academic who identifies as a scholar-activist. To begin with, may I ask you to introduce yourself, and what you do as a researcher, as an academic, as a teacher, that brought you to become a scholar-activist?Vasna Ramasar (VR). Thank you Muriel! I am happy to introduce myself and the many layers that I bring to my academic work. As you…
Penser les villes et les citadinités par le dessin: Entretien avec Malou Allagnat, Dolorès Bertrais et Émilie Guitard, réalisé par Muriel Côte le 3 mai 2024 sur zoom
Super SDKs: Tracking personal data and platform monopolies in the mobile
In this article we address the question 'what is tracking in the mobile ecosystem' through a comprehensive overview of the Software Development Kit (SDK). Our research reveals a complex infrastructural role for these technical objects connecting end-user data with app developers, third parties and dominant advertising platforms like Google and Facebook. We present an innovative theoretical framework which we call a data monadology to foreground t…
Furious depletion—Conceptualizing artisan mining and extractivism through gender, race, and environment
A buoyant debate has grown in political ecology and agrarian studies around the concept of extractivism. It shines a light on forms of human and non-human depletion that fuel contemporary capitalism. Within this debate however, artisan mining has been hard to fit in. Artisan mining is a form of small scale mineral extraction that occupies around 45 million people around the world, and sustains the life of many more, especially in the Global South…
Artisanal and small-scale mining through a “labour regime” lens: Consolidating a research agenda on labour exploitation
This article examines the way the notion of labour regime in artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) research can contribute to new ways of conceptualising this sector's challenges. It starts by reviewing how the phenomenal expansion of ASM over the last decades has been problematised, and highlights the need to better understand what drives artisanal miners to operate under extremely precarious work conditions, and the role they play in shaping t…
Introduction: L’éthique de l’or, l’or (in)juste
La demande de minerais n’a cessé d’augmenter ces dernières décennies, passant de 27 milliards de tonnes en 1970 à 92 milliards en 2017 (UN, 2021). Les activités des industries extractives n’ont pas seulement augmenté, elles se sont également déplacées des pays les plus riches aux pays les plus pauvres. Parmi les 72 pays classifiés comme pays à revenus bas ou moyens en 2019, 63 ont accru leur dépendance économique à ces activités au cours des troi…
Did you give permission? Datafication in the mobile ecosystem
Our article presents a finely granulated perspective on the technical objects of datafication. We contend that such cross-disciplinary focus provides a more rigorous material grounding for a critical analysis of the socio-cultural and political economic effects of mobile actors expanding and extending personal data economies. We propose a two-part hypothesis. First, that the mobile is enabling a more mature phase of datafication. Second, that thi…
Discomforts in the academy: From ‘academic burnout’ to collective mobilisation
As part of a set of interventions on discomfort feminism, this article addresses how the politics of discomfort informs boundary work in the neoliberalized academic workplace in Switzerland. Departing from the authors’ engagements in a series of workshops on new forms of stress and pressure in academia and the effects of the deteriorating conditions of labor at their department, this article explores multiple and unevenly distributed emotions of …
Give more data, awareness and control to individual citizens, and they will help Covid-19 containment
The rapid dynamics of COVID-19 calls for quick and effective tracking of virus transmission chains and early detection of outbreaks, especially in the “phase 2” of the pandemic, when lockdown and other restriction measures are progressively withdrawn, in order to avoid or minimize contagion resurgence. For this purpose, contact-tracing apps are being proposed for large scale adoption by many countries. A centralized approach, where data sensed by…
Bias and Discrimination in AI: A Cross-Disciplinary Perspective
Operating at a large scale and impacting large groups of people, automated systems can make consequential and sometimes contestable decisions. Automated decisions can impact a range of phenomena, from credit scores to insurance payouts to health evaluations. These forms of automation can become problematic when they place certain groups or people at a systematic disadvantage. These are cases of discrimination-which is legally defined as the unfai…
Frames of extractivism: Small-scale goldmining formalization and state violence in Colombia
Colombia's economy largely relies on an extractivist logic that increasingly focuses on industrial mineral extraction. The industry is regularly depicted as a means to bring economic development, to severe the ties of illegally armed groups to mineral extraction, and to bring peace and prosperity to mining regions in a period of macro-political transition. Yet, contrary to this plan, mining-related violence, and more specifically state-sanctioned…
Politiser le « vide sécuritaire: À propos des groupes d'autodéfense koglweogo au Burkina Faso
Au Burkina Faso, l'émergence récente des groupes d'autodéfense « koglweogo » est souvent mise en lien avec la notion de « vide sécuritaire ». Cependant, considérer l'émergence des koglweogo comme la manifestation de l'absence de l'État dépolitise les rapports de force qui sous-tendent le phénomène des groupes d'autodéfense. En nous appuyant sur l'analyse des justifications de l'émergence et du travail des koglweogo et de la politique de police de…
Politicizing the will to adapt: Towards critical resilience studies
Community-based citizenship: Autochthony and land claim politics under forest decentralization in Burkina Faso
Introduction: The trouble with forest: definitions, values and boundaries
Forest is in trouble. The most recent (2015) FAO Forest Resources Assessment shows an encouraging trend towards a decrease in deforestation rates, but it also points out that since 1990 total forest loss corresponds to an area the size of South Africa. Efforts to curtail deforestation require reliable assessments, yet current definitions for what a forest exactly is differ significantly across countries, institutions and epistemic communities. Th…
Fuelwood territorialities: Chantier d'Aménagement Forestier and the reproduction of “political forests” in Burkina Faso
This paper investigates the endurance of a national forest management programme in Burkina Faso called Chantier d'Aménagement Forestier (CAF), which focuses on the participatory sustainable production of fuelwood and is widely supported by international donors despite evidence of its shortcomings. We analyse the surprising persistence of the CAF model as a case of the territorialisation of state power through the reproduction of “political forest…
Making Concessions: Extractive Enclaves, Entangled Capitalism and Regulative Pluralism at the Gold Mining Frontier in Burkina Faso
Resilience thinking meets social theory: Situating social change in socio-ecological systems (SES) research
The concept of resilience in ecology has been expanded into a framework to analyse human-environment dynamics. The extension of resilience notions to society has important limits, particularly its conceptualization of social change. The paper argues that this stems from the lack of attention to normative and epistemological issues underlying the notion of ‘social resilience’. We suggest that critically examining the role of knowledge at the inter…
Making Concessions: Extractive Enclaves, Entangled Capitalism and Regulative Pluralism at the Gold Mining Frontier in Burkina Faso
Utopian Pedagogy: Creating Radical Alternatives in the Neoliberal Age 1
How might we, as critical academics, work within, against, and beyond the neoliberal order? How might the progressive intellectual act and be understood today? How can and does the university do more than serve corporate powers and produce docile producerconsumer- citizens? How are people working to develop critical pedagogies appropriate to their local communities? To help us confront these sorts of questions we propose the conceptual tool and c…
Community-based citizenship: Autochthony and land claim politics under forest decentralization in Burkina Faso
Hacking the social life of Big Data
This paper builds off the Our Data Ourselves research project, which examined ways of understanding and reclaiming the data that young people produce on smartphone devices. Here we explore the growing usage and centrality of mobiles in the lives of young people, questioning what data-making possibilities exist if users can either uncover and/or capture what data controllers such as Facebook monetize and share about themselves with third-parties. …
Data Motility: The Materiality of Big Social Data
In this article, the author uses Foucault's largely overlooked but vital concept, the dispositif, in relation to the recent rise of mobility, explosion of data and proliferation of platforms and apps. With a focus on how data an individual generates increasingly moves autonomously of their control, he presents the dispositif of 'data motility' to develop a new materialist analysis of the digital human as a discursive and non-discursive assemblage
Introduction: Are We All Cultural Workers Now
Introducing a themed section entitled ‘Are We All Cultural Workers Now?’, this article explores the relation between precarity and cultural work. It argues that precarity should be understood as an experience rather than a category that allows a mapping of transformations of social class. The article also engages with current debates on cultural work and questions the proposition that changes in this area presage more general shifts in the organi…
Discomforts in the academy: From ‘academic burnout’ to collective mobilisation
As part of a set of interventions on discomfort feminism, this article addresses how the politics of discomfort informs boundary work in the neoliberalized academic workplace in Switzerland. Departing from the authors’ engagements in a series of workshops on new forms of stress and pressure in academia and the effects of the deteriorating conditions of labor at their department, this article explores multiple and unevenly distributed emotions of …
Frames of extractivism: Small-scale goldmining formalization and state violence in Colombia
Colombia's economy largely relies on an extractivist logic that increasingly focuses on industrial mineral extraction. The industry is regularly depicted as a means to bring economic development, to severe the ties of illegally armed groups to mineral extraction, and to bring peace and prosperity to mining regions in a period of macro-political transition. Yet, contrary to this plan, mining-related violence, and more specifically state-sanctioned…
Artisanal and small-scale mining through a “labour regime” lens: Consolidating a research agenda on labour exploitation
This article examines the way the notion of labour regime in artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) research can contribute to new ways of conceptualising this sector's challenges. It starts by reviewing how the phenomenal expansion of ASM over the last decades has been problematised, and highlights the need to better understand what drives artisanal miners to operate under extremely precarious work conditions, and the role they play in shaping t…
Super SDKs: Tracking personal data and platform monopolies in the mobile
In this article we address the question 'what is tracking in the mobile ecosystem' through a comprehensive overview of the Software Development Kit (SDK). Our research reveals a complex infrastructural role for these technical objects connecting end-user data with app developers, third parties and dominant advertising platforms like Google and Facebook. We present an innovative theoretical framework which we call a data monadology to foreground t…
Furious depletion—Conceptualizing artisan mining and extractivism through gender, race, and environment
A buoyant debate has grown in political ecology and agrarian studies around the concept of extractivism. It shines a light on forms of human and non-human depletion that fuel contemporary capitalism. Within this debate however, artisan mining has been hard to fit in. Artisan mining is a form of small scale mineral extraction that occupies around 45 million people around the world, and sustains the life of many more, especially in the Global South…
Politiser le « vide sécuritaire: À propos des groupes d'autodéfense koglweogo au Burkina Faso
Au Burkina Faso, l'émergence récente des groupes d'autodéfense « koglweogo » est souvent mise en lien avec la notion de « vide sécuritaire ». Cependant, considérer l'émergence des koglweogo comme la manifestation de l'absence de l'État dépolitise les rapports de force qui sous-tendent le phénomène des groupes d'autodéfense. En nous appuyant sur l'analyse des justifications de l'émergence et du travail des koglweogo et de la politique de police de…
Politicizing the will to adapt: Towards critical resilience studies
Society Must Be Defended’: Lectures at the College de France
Utopian Pedagogy: Creating Radical Alternatives in the Neoliberal Age 1
How might we, as critical academics, work within, against, and beyond the neoliberal order? How might the progressive intellectual act and be understood today? How can and does the university do more than serve corporate powers and produce docile producerconsumer- citizens? How are people working to develop critical pedagogies appropriate to their local communities? To help us confront these sorts of questions we propose the conceptual tool and c…
Resilience thinking meets social theory: Situating social change in socio-ecological systems (SES) research
The concept of resilience in ecology has been expanded into a framework to analyse human-environment dynamics. The extension of resilience notions to society has important limits, particularly its conceptualization of social change. The paper argues that this stems from the lack of attention to normative and epistemological issues underlying the notion of ‘social resilience’. We suggest that critically examining the role of knowledge at the inter…
What Is a Media Dispositif? Compositions With Bifo
This article is a dialogue with the Italian autonomist media theorist Franco Berardi, also known as Bifo. The discussion turns on how to conceptually frame Italian experiments in media activism—from the pirate broadcaster Radio Alice to the networked microemissions of Teletreet. Throughout, special emphasis is put on the importance of Foucault, and Deleuze and Guattari to the creative wing of Italian autonomist thought which focused on media, com…
The Prehistoric Turn?: Networked New Media, Mobility, and the Body
This chapter considers the increasingly important dimensions of location and mobility in networked new media. It examines the relationship between the human and technology by foregrounding the body. In particular, it asks how the mediated materiality of the body interfaces with the immateriality of global information flows in ubiquitous distributed media environments. Three main threads comprise this inquiry, all unfolding under the specter of th…
Technological Infestation—Human Becoming Insect: Parikka’s Insect Media
Technological Infestation—Human Becoming Insect: Parikka’s Insect Media Mark Coté (bio) Jussi Parikka, Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. 281 pp. US $25 (Paper). ISBN: 9780816667406 Insects have long comprised a minoritarian but important strand for thinking about the human condition and our perception of the world. It is said that one of Spinoza’s guilty pleasures was in capt…
Data Motility: The Materiality of Big Social Data
In this article, the author uses Foucault's largely overlooked but vital concept, the dispositif, in relation to the recent rise of mobility, explosion of data and proliferation of platforms and apps. With a focus on how data an individual generates increasingly moves autonomously of their control, he presents the dispositif of 'data motility' to develop a new materialist analysis of the digital human as a discursive and non-discursive assemblage
Introduction: Are We All Cultural Workers Now
Introducing a themed section entitled ‘Are We All Cultural Workers Now?’, this article explores the relation between precarity and cultural work. It argues that precarity should be understood as an experience rather than a category that allows a mapping of transformations of social class. The article also engages with current debates on cultural work and questions the proposition that changes in this area presage more general shifts in the organi…
Hacking the social life of Big Data
This paper builds off the Our Data Ourselves research project, which examined ways of understanding and reclaiming the data that young people produce on smartphone devices. Here we explore the growing usage and centrality of mobiles in the lives of young people, questioning what data-making possibilities exist if users can either uncover and/or capture what data controllers such as Facebook monetize and share about themselves with third-parties. …
Making Concessions: Extractive Enclaves, Entangled Capitalism and Regulative Pluralism at the Gold Mining Frontier in Burkina Faso
Introduction: The trouble with forest: definitions, values and boundaries
Forest is in trouble. The most recent (2015) FAO Forest Resources Assessment shows an encouraging trend towards a decrease in deforestation rates, but it also points out that since 1990 total forest loss corresponds to an area the size of South Africa. Efforts to curtail deforestation require reliable assessments, yet current definitions for what a forest exactly is differ significantly across countries, institutions and epistemic communities. Th…
Fuelwood territorialities: Chantier d'Aménagement Forestier and the reproduction of “political forests” in Burkina Faso
This paper investigates the endurance of a national forest management programme in Burkina Faso called Chantier d'Aménagement Forestier (CAF), which focuses on the participatory sustainable production of fuelwood and is widely supported by international donors despite evidence of its shortcomings. We analyse the surprising persistence of the CAF model as a case of the territorialisation of state power through the reproduction of “political forest…
Politicizing the will to adapt: Towards critical resilience studies
Community-based citizenship: Autochthony and land claim politics under forest decentralization in Burkina Faso
Give more data, awareness and control to individual citizens, and they will help Covid-19 containment
The rapid dynamics of COVID-19 calls for quick and effective tracking of virus transmission chains and early detection of outbreaks, especially in the “phase 2” of the pandemic, when lockdown and other restriction measures are progressively withdrawn, in order to avoid or minimize contagion resurgence. For this purpose, contact-tracing apps are being proposed for large scale adoption by many countries. A centralized approach, where data sensed by…
Bias and Discrimination in AI: A Cross-Disciplinary Perspective
Operating at a large scale and impacting large groups of people, automated systems can make consequential and sometimes contestable decisions. Automated decisions can impact a range of phenomena, from credit scores to insurance payouts to health evaluations. These forms of automation can become problematic when they place certain groups or people at a systematic disadvantage. These are cases of discrimination-which is legally defined as the unfai…
Frames of extractivism: Small-scale goldmining formalization and state violence in Colombia
Colombia's economy largely relies on an extractivist logic that increasingly focuses on industrial mineral extraction. The industry is regularly depicted as a means to bring economic development, to severe the ties of illegally armed groups to mineral extraction, and to bring peace and prosperity to mining regions in a period of macro-political transition. Yet, contrary to this plan, mining-related violence, and more specifically state-sanctioned…
Politiser le « vide sécuritaire: À propos des groupes d'autodéfense koglweogo au Burkina Faso
Au Burkina Faso, l'émergence récente des groupes d'autodéfense « koglweogo » est souvent mise en lien avec la notion de « vide sécuritaire ». Cependant, considérer l'émergence des koglweogo comme la manifestation de l'absence de l'État dépolitise les rapports de force qui sous-tendent le phénomène des groupes d'autodéfense. En nous appuyant sur l'analyse des justifications de l'émergence et du travail des koglweogo et de la politique de police de…
Introduction: L’éthique de l’or, l’or (in)juste
La demande de minerais n’a cessé d’augmenter ces dernières décennies, passant de 27 milliards de tonnes en 1970 à 92 milliards en 2017 (UN, 2021). Les activités des industries extractives n’ont pas seulement augmenté, elles se sont également déplacées des pays les plus riches aux pays les plus pauvres. Parmi les 72 pays classifiés comme pays à revenus bas ou moyens en 2019, 63 ont accru leur dépendance économique à ces activités au cours des troi…
Did you give permission? Datafication in the mobile ecosystem
Our article presents a finely granulated perspective on the technical objects of datafication. We contend that such cross-disciplinary focus provides a more rigorous material grounding for a critical analysis of the socio-cultural and political economic effects of mobile actors expanding and extending personal data economies. We propose a two-part hypothesis. First, that the mobile is enabling a more mature phase of datafication. Second, that thi…
Discomforts in the academy: From ‘academic burnout’ to collective mobilisation
As part of a set of interventions on discomfort feminism, this article addresses how the politics of discomfort informs boundary work in the neoliberalized academic workplace in Switzerland. Departing from the authors’ engagements in a series of workshops on new forms of stress and pressure in academia and the effects of the deteriorating conditions of labor at their department, this article explores multiple and unevenly distributed emotions of …
Furious depletion—Conceptualizing artisan mining and extractivism through gender, race, and environment
A buoyant debate has grown in political ecology and agrarian studies around the concept of extractivism. It shines a light on forms of human and non-human depletion that fuel contemporary capitalism. Within this debate however, artisan mining has been hard to fit in. Artisan mining is a form of small scale mineral extraction that occupies around 45 million people around the world, and sustains the life of many more, especially in the Global South…
Artisanal and small-scale mining through a “labour regime” lens: Consolidating a research agenda on labour exploitation
This article examines the way the notion of labour regime in artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) research can contribute to new ways of conceptualising this sector's challenges. It starts by reviewing how the phenomenal expansion of ASM over the last decades has been problematised, and highlights the need to better understand what drives artisanal miners to operate under extremely precarious work conditions, and the role they play in shaping t…
Resistance to Extractivism‐Induced Water Insecurity. Does Gender Have a Role in It? A Systematic Scoping Review
Extractivist practices threaten water security and with it, people's health and livelihoods. Numerous communities around the world are engaged in the strenuous work of resistance against mining. Through our previous research, we matured a sense that women are a major force behind organizing for water security, particularly because they often refer to an embodied sense of urgency to act against ongoing extractivism to preserve their waters and ter…
What does being a scholar-activist imply: An interview with Vasna Ramasar by Muriel Côte
Muriel Côte (MC). Good afternoon to you Vasna Ramasar, and thank you for agreeing to share your experience as an academic who identifies as a scholar-activist. To begin with, may I ask you to introduce yourself, and what you do as a researcher, as an academic, as a teacher, that brought you to become a scholar-activist?Vasna Ramasar (VR). Thank you Muriel! I am happy to introduce myself and the many layers that I bring to my academic work. As you…
Political science (18 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Geography (10 works) · Politics (10 works) · Computer Science (9 works) · Epistemology (8 works) · Water Governance and Infrastructure (8 works) · Art (7 works) · Law (7 works) · Mining and Resource Management (7 works)