Presentation long abstract

This paper examines the discourses and legitimating strategies that underpin efforts to expand private coal extraction in India. It highlights the continued dominance of arguments around resource nationalism and energy security which characterised the earlier period of state-led mining. At the same time, specific ways in which these long-running narratives are mobilised by the state and private actors have evolved significantly in the context of liberalisation. The paper focuses particularly on evolving legal and regulatory frameworks that attempt to balance the interests of private capital and mining-affected communities. It argues that such interventions are highly inadequate, but nevertheless provide vital opportunities for affected groups to challenge their dispossession and exploitation. However, their ability to contest broader pro-coal hegemonies remains unclear, especially since many such struggles focus on more locally specific concerns. Methodologically, the paper draws from government documents on coal mines allocated through the ‘mining for captive use’ and ‘commercial mining’ mechanisms, and project-specific documentation for a purposively selected sample of private coal mines. Its findings have wider relevance for explaining how dominant understandings of coal are sustained in rapidly industrialising contexts, even in the face of an existential climate crises, and for exploring how these could be effectively challenged.

Presentation short abstract

India's stated intent to decarbonise by 2070 does not translate into a specific point in time or space for coal mining to end. The end of coal is an abstract concept, empirically observable through protracted processes of mine closure, encapsulated within expanding coal extraction.

Presentation long abstract

The end of coal in a major fossil fuel extractor like India is urgent. And yet, the country’s stated intent to decarbonise by 2070 does not translate into a specific point in time or space for coal mining to end. This paper argues that any coal closures must be viewed in relation to a larger ‘extractive continuum’, the continuous range of extractive activities undertaken by the state and its allies, which coexists with the country’s political narrative on decarbonisation. It contends that the end of coal is an abstract concept, empirically observable through protracted processes of mine closure, encapsulated within expanding coal extraction. Intensive qualitative research in Ib Valley coalfield in northwestern Odisha confirms this continuum of coal extraction. The paper reveals how strategic calculations around land acquisition by coal proponents have staggered dispossession in mining villages here over decades. This process is reconfiguring micro-geographies in the coalfield, deepening social divisions, and creating new fractures. The paper demonstrates how staggered dispossession, as a highly effective mode of power of the extractive continuum, works to weaken coalfield communities, while intensifying their dependence on the coal proponent. These impacts deeply constrain local political agency to envision, let alone steer, a coal-free future.

Presentation short abstract

This paper analyses how hegemonic rural masculinities and heritage regimes in El Bierzo (Spain) sustain coal’s afterlives, producing a liminal post-extractive condition that feminist just transition frameworks help to reveal and contest.

Presentation long abstract

In post-coal territories, extractive decline rarely dismantles the cultural and symbolic regimes that historically organised power. In El Bierzo (northwest Spain), coal closure coexists with the persistence of a normative territorial identity rooted in hegemonic rural masculinities—an identity historically linked to hardness, sacrifice and male-coded productive labour. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork and discourse analysis, this paper examines how these gendered infrastructures of meaning sustain coal afterlives even in the absence of extraction.

The argument draws on feminist just transition frameworks ((Lieu et al., 2020; Mang-Benza, 2021), and emphasises on the need to address recognitional, procedural and distributive justice (Fraser, 1995; Tyler, 2000; Rawls, 2001). In El Bierzo, these dimensions are constrained by heritage practices that elevate mining ruins, industrial nostalgia and heroic male iconographies as the core of local authenticity. Such selective patrimonialisation, as discussed by Dicks (2003), reinforces hierarchical distinctions between valued and devalued subjects, marginalising women’s experiences, care-based economies and non-extractive livelihoods.

This symbolic ordering produces a liminal post-coal condition: a suspended state in which extractive pasts continue to structure political imagination, while "just" transitions remain procedurally narrow and socially exclusionary. Rather than enabling diversification, transition programmes interact with existing gendered hierarchies in ways that reproduce fossil-era logics through cultural rather than material means.

By situating El Bierzo within broader debates on feminist territorial justice and post-coal realities, the paper demonstrates how coal’s hegemony survives through the reproduction of masculine-coded identity based heritage and institutional narratives that delimit who is recognised as a legitimate subject of the future.

Presentation short abstract

The Tharparkar desert in Pakistan has become an extractive assemblage of Pakistani and Chinese state and non-state actors, capital flows, extractive logics and a site of resistance. The study interrogates the role of class, religion and caste in resistance movements against coal mining.

Presentation long abstract

The Tharparkar desert is under immense pressure of temporal, spatial and social reconfigurations because of coal energy development in Pakistan under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The threat of socio-ecological destruction has given rise to a long ongoing resistance by Thari indigenous community against the Thar coal mining project. The Tharparkar desert has become an extractive assemblage of Pakistani and Chinese state and non-state actors, local and global capital flows, extractive logics across scales and a site of resistance.

The Thari indigenous community is resisting extractivist imperatives through multiple strategies and forms of resistance including sit-in, ‘long march’ to provincial capital, blocking access to mine and road, litigation and social media activism. The repertoire of resistance spans into both structured and everyday form of resistance.

The resistance has been, though successful in some demands is marred, with class interests of landed and business elite against landless agricultural labour and herders. Furthermore, the class interests intersect with religion and caste politics. These dynamics combined together play an important role in transformative potential of resistance or lack thereof. The study interrogates the role of class, religion and caste in resistance movements against coal mining.

Presentation short abstract

Focusing on internationalist fossil fuel divestment movements in India, Australia, and the United States, this talk discusses how land-based struggles have articulated novel methods to challenge the “toxic debt” through which global coal supply chains are financed.

Presentation long abstract

This paper analyzes the ways in which fossil fuel divestment movements have developed novel methods to challenge the “toxic debt” through which global coal supply chains are financed. Focusing on divestment campaigns to reclaim dispossessed lands in India, Australia, and the United States, I argue that fossil fuel divestment movements must engage with global debt markets to accelerate a just transition away from coal. Bond markets, in which fossil fuel corporations issue long term debt to generate fixed income for financial investors, have now eclipsed bank loans and stock markets as the primary source of capital for the coal industry. Through geographical and spatial analysis of coal mines, power plants, and ports across the Asia Pacific, the paper illustrates how fossil fuel divestment campaigns have put pressure on contingent relationships between fossil fuel corporations, bank underwriters, credit rating agencies, and investors across primary and secondary bond markets. While bond markets and their connections to fossil fuel corporations are often opaque, divestment campaigns have uncovered the ways in which overleveraged fossil fuel infrastructures present significant financial, environmental, and social risks for global investors.

Presentation short abstract

Nowhere in Germany is open-pit lignite mining as invasive as in Łužyca. Majority-Sorbian villages have been eradicated or teeter on the edge of open pit mines, with destruction supported by the hegemony of extraction. Sorbian-language literature provides strong counter-claims.

Presentation long abstract

Nowhere in Germany is open-pit lignite (or brown coal) mining as invasive as it is in Lusatia (Łužyca in the indigenous and marginalized Lower Sorbian language of the region). Up to 7 cubic meters of overburden have to be moved for every ton of lignite extracted. This ‘overburden’ is, of course, soil teeming with human and more-than-human life. The result is an extractive landscape in which even some of the biggest extractive equipment in the world seems tiny, with villages – insofar as they still exist given the expansion of the open pits – teetering on the crumbling edges.

This paper examines the hegemonic discourse that positions lignite mining in Łužyca as ‘natural’ or unavoidable and beneficial to the region and its people, juxtaposing this particular narrative with both the socio-metabolic data on energy returns on energy investment in lignite mining and, centrally, with the literary confrontations and counter-claims from within the Sorbian communities. The villages that have been eradicated and those that are in danger were and are some of the last remaining majority-Sorbian settlements, and it is not just geological but also more recent history that goes up in smoke when lignite is combusted.

The title of this paper is a nod to Sorbian writer Jurij Koch’s diary-like documentation, entitled Gruben Rand Notizen (Pit Edge Notes) of the destruction of the village Horno for the sake of lignite mining in the 1990s.

Presentation short abstract

This paper examines Walloon terrils as liminal “coal worlds,” showing how coal’s afterlives shape ecologies, power relations, and new forms of exclusion, revealing energy transitions as contested, but deeply embedded in power relations.

Presentation long abstract

Coal extraction in Wallonia ended decades ago, leaving behind more than 500 terrils – artificial hills made of coal mining residue. Although the mines closed half a century ago, these post-industrial landscapes continue to shape the region’s social, ecological, cultural, and political dynamics. Today, the coal-enriched soils of terrils host biodiversity while drawing a wide range of actors—associations, public authorities, private developers, nearby residents, and users. These groups mobilise diverse and sometimes competing meanings related to environmental protection, mining heritage, territorial symbolism, leisure, and energy transition. Terrils, as genuine ruins of capitalism, have become spaces of spontaneous emergence (Tsing, 2015).

Since the 1970s, terrils are subject to new forms of appropriation. They have been re-exploited for residual resources (Bianchi, 2021), reframed as green spaces (Checker, 2020), and valued for their symbolic capital (Adam & Comby, 2020). They are targeted for solar or wind energy infrastructures. These interventions follow neoliberal spatial logics (Pinson, 2020) and a sustainability discourse (Adam, 2025), transforming peripheral places into sites of opportunity (Mattoug, 2021). They threaten uses, displace humans and non-humans, generating forms of green gentrification (Clerval, 2013) and extractive revival (del Mármol & Vaccaro, 2020).

Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork, 80 user testimonies, 300 press articles, and a multispecies approach, this paper conceptualises terrils as liminal “coal worlds” (Lahiri-Dutt, 2016). It argues that coal’s afterlives generate dispossession (Yusoff, 2018) and socio-ecological inequalities, revealing energy transitions and green politics as contested processes embedded in relations of domination, shaped by subjectivities (Bisoka et al., 2019).

Presentation short abstract

When a coal exit happens unplanned, as in Ermenek, Turkey, the town is left in limbo. Drawing on interviews and fieldwork, this study shows how people keep turning back to mining for security and identity, offering new insight into why some communities stuggle to move on.

Presentation long abstract

This paper examines the decade-long aftermath of an unplanned exit from coal in Ermenek, a mining town Turkey where nine underground pits were permanently closed after the 2014 disaster that killed 18 miners. Drawing on extensive multi-sited qualitative fieldwork (interviews with miners, families, local officials, and industry actors) the study approaches Ermenek as a revealing instance of how coal worlds endure even after extraction ends.

In a political context marked by authoritarian governance, selective environmentalism, and resurgent resource nationalism, the abrupt closure produces not transition but a prolonged limbo. Although most mines are gone, many residents continue to look back to extraction as the most familiar and dependable source of dignity and security, keeping alive the expectation that mining might one day return. Meanwhile, proposed alternatives (eg. ecotourism, agriculture, service work) circulate as ideas but are rarely pursued or prove ill-suited to local realities. The absence of robust labor–environment alliances, coupled with deep uncertainty about life after mining, reinforces the symbolic pull of coal, while everyday narratives of national sovereignty and suspicion toward externally driven climate agendas help sustain the plausibility of reopening the pits.

By foregrounding unplanned exit as an analytical category, the paper shows how “just transition” in peripheral settings often remains more a slogan than a lived process, reduced to short-term, centrally managed gestures with little restorative capacity. Ermenek demonstrates how transitions that exist in name but not in practice can deepen mistrust, leaving communities both unprepared for and resentful toward broader climate and transition agendas.