Paper short abstract:

This paper explores gendered representations of mining futures within the transnational sustainable mining policy assemblage, alongside the gendered contingencies of women's ASM livelihoods in Mozambique and Kenya shaped by familial relations, expectations and normative enactments.

Paper long abstract:

The futures of mining are many, or so it would seem from the growing assemblage of transnational initiatives to establish mining's promise of sustainability. Sometimes mining sustainability is configured as circular; an endless possibility of hope, progress and shared benefit. Other times, mining has a delimited future, requiring present planning to achieve a balanced, but sanguine, future resolution. In yet other accounts, the environmental future wrought by mining is a heavy, dark promise of a disaster foretold. These varied futures intermingle with what is often taken to be mining's inherent contingency, with geology, investment capital, markets, or wider legal environments combining to produce this sector as ripe with simultaneous potential for risk or reward. This paper explores gendered representations of mining's multiple futures as they circulate within the sustainable mining policy assemblage, and in the livelihoods of women artisanal gold miners in Manica, Mozambique and Migori, Kenya. The contingency of women's gold mining livelihoods are compounded by their positioning within gendered models of family structures. We consider different features of the gendered "social work" of work for these women, showing how this economic activity is often implicated in familial decisions and assessments. In this analysis, we critically examine the tendency to emphasize only law and legal authority as the principal vehicles by which a future hinged to a changed present is said to be possible by ethnographically showing how this economic activity for both women and men is often implicated in familial decisions and assessments.