Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Focusing on women living with the aftermath of uranium mining in former Czechoslovakia, the paper examines how everyday practices of gendered care, fear for one’s family and bodily strain are forms through which the social and health costs of extraction affect women in a postsocialist mining region.

Paper long abstract

Analytically, this paper traces how the material and social residues of uranium extraction – health legacies, polluted environments, reconfigured welfare provisions and uneven reciprocity – persist through gendered divisions of labor and moral expectations in a former mining region in western Moravia. It then examines how women living with these long-term social and health consequences manage and live through them via everyday practices of gendered care, fear for one’s family and bodily strain.

Drawing on ethnographic-historical research, it combines oral history interviews, archival sources, and local print media to follow women’s lives from the late 1950s through the closure of uranium mines in 2017 and into the post-extraction present. In doing so, the paper contributes to debates on social reproduction, slow violence and care in socialist and postsocialist Europe.

In an industrial landscape usually narrated through male miners and underground work, women sustained the community’s social world through auxiliary and service roles within the mining complex as well as through domestic and emotional care in households.

Their oral histories show how care extended beyond households to include managing damaged bodies and uncertain environments, caring for children in households marked by illness and early death, and sustaining fragile community ties, often through uneven and personalized forms of reciprocity. Practices of tending, worrying, managing and compensating, together with the reconfiguration of welfare provisions, shifted additional responsibilities onto women. Gendered care functioned as mechanisms through which these consequences were addressed, redistributed, and normalized in everyday life.