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Paper short abstract

This paper follows ghabra (phosphate dust) in Tunisia’s mining basin to trace how extraction transforms rock into atmosphere. Attending to ghabra’s "phase shifts" (Choy & Zee, 2015) reveals how it escape containment, reconfigure breath, and shape multispecies life in late industrial landscapes.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines phosphate extraction in southern Tunisia through ghabra, the feral (Tsing, 2015) dust that escapes extractive choreographies and settles into bodies, landscapes, and narratives. Starting from the ethnographic insight that phosphate never fully leaves Gafsa's mining basin, but instead stays as ghabra, the article explores how extraction operates through material transformations that exceed spatial, technical, and political containment.

Drawing on ethnographic research, I follow phosphate through its transformations from blasted mountains to airborne particles, and from industrial categories of “steriles” to residues coating mountain slopes, skin, leaves, and homes. These transformations unsettle the distinction between product and waste and challenge the idea of a bounded workplace. As a material and affective dust, ghabra interferes with plant respiration and pollination, settles into lungs, redistributes labor into gendered practices of care, and appears metaphorically in nostalgic narratives of welfare provision that obscure the erosion of both industrial and social infrastructures.

Situating these dynamics within the longer histories of imperial extraction that have shaped Gafsa (Gruskin, 2021; Jackson, 2016), the paper foregrounds material transformation as a site where political economy becomes a question of breath and breathability. Attending to ghabra through "suspension" (Choy & Zee, 2015) as an art of noticing phase shifts, I trace how phosphate extraction configures socio-ecological relations at the interface of land and air. Ultimately, ghabra reveals extraction not only as an outward flow of commodities, but as an atmospheric condition that continues to shape life, labor, and breath in mining towns long after phosphate-as-commodity is gone.