New publication: Gold and geo-uncertainty in the making
We are happy to share a new publication by Anna Frohn Pedersen.
The paper is titled ‘Gold and geo-uncertainty in the making: The introduction of cyanide in Tanzania’s artisanal and small-scale mining sector’, and published in Geoforum. It is open access and can be found here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016718525000764
In the paper, Anna explores how recent cyanidation technologies have transformed artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) practices around the world – an extractive technology that allows actors to efficiently recover gold from mining residues and profit from mining.
The paper is based on ethnographic research from the ASGM sector of Tanzania, and inspired by the anthropological and geographical literature on resource-making that highlights the relational aspects of resource-making, comprising human as well as non-human actors.
What is particularly striking about the extractive sector, however, is that resource-making relies on elusive underground materials that can be difficult to anticipate, calculate and estimate. With this in mind, the paper asks how the use of cyanidation shapes resource-making practices and co-configure issues of geological uncertainty in ASGM?
The paper illustrates how technologies reconfigure the boundaries between mining waste and resources, while also shaping relations of trust, suspicion and uncertainty.
Based on these findings, the paper speaks to a deeper engagement with the ‘geo-uncertainties’ embedded in the extractive industries, and argues that these are never fixed conditions, but changing along the developments of new resource-making practices and technologies.