Abstract:
    With its self-proclaimed territorial rights over the domains of nature, environment and resources, and the interpretations of the relationships that the humans have with them, the discipline of geography has, in recent years, established that nature cannot be understood either as an “immaculate linguistic conception” (i.e., a mental or social construction), or an object knowable through absolutist knowledge of real world entities and processes that are separate from human intervention (i.e., unadulterated physical environment).

If we consider resources (and the environment) as co-constituted by nature and humans, and more than just a sum of their innate physical properties, then we begin to excavate their multiple meanings and values to develop a productive conversation with researchers located in other disciplines. More importantly, we begin to envision some aspects of mineral resource extraction in countries of the Global South ‘differently’, outside the standard textbook type resource-related theorisations that were developed with industrialised mining in mind.

Such a consideration allows us to see the diverse and hybrid worlds of mining that are generally hidden from the public view, constituting a part of, and extension of mining into, the complex informal sector where every day the peasants are being transformed into precarious workers. When linked with recent re-evaluations of classical understandings of agrarian transition and rural change, the peasant lives in mineral extractive regimes widen the scope of our understandings of political, social and economic processes associated with resource extraction.

Drawing on extensive fieldwork and empirical evidence from India, this presentation will show how the analytical framework of ‘extractive peasants’ can robustly illuminate the many worlds of coal, the diverse array of its extractive regimes and practices, and the roles that this substance plays in the livelihoods of millions of poor who live on the coal-rich tracts of India and produce different meanings of this substance and its mining.

About the Speaker:
     Dr. Kuntala Lahiri Dutt is a Senior Fellow, Resource Environment & Development (RE&D) Program, Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia. She is one of the leading global experts in critical research on the length and breadth of gender and community livelihoods in two areas of natural resources: water and extractive industries (mining). Her research is informed by feminist scholar-activist research methodologies. She has published on how rivers are ‘imagined’ and how the ungovernable chars (river islands) blur the boundary between land and water. Her research on changing perceptions and practices of water use by middle class, urban households, and her reflections on feminist methodologies on researching water and gender have charted new ways of thinking about water resources.

Her current research focuses, with funding from an ARC Discovery Project grant (‘Beyond the Resource Curse’), on understanding the poor, experiencing agrarian and social changes, make a living on mineral-rich tracts. This project represents her long term interests in the moral economy of mineral-dependent livelihoods, primarily in India but also in Lao PDR and Indonesia, and in Mongolia (www.asmasiapacific.org). Related to this major endeavor is her ongoing interest on the social life of underground space, with particular reference to the history of Indian coal mines.
For more details:
https://crawford.anu.edu.au/people/academic/kuntala-lahiri-dutt