Presentation short abstract

As power struggles unfold over access to ‘critical minerals’, the consensus among experts and policy makers is that due diligence and disclosure on environmental and social 'risks’ in supply chains will address socioecological harms. I ground truth their assumptions in Zambian manganese mines.

Presentation long abstract

Toxic dust is the unruly consequence of extraction that reminds us how leaky both ‘nature’ and the taxonomic systems that support extractivism are. While the obedient matter of ore sits in orderly piles, dust defies capture and control. Dust hitches rides on the open trucks driving from mine to market but gets distracted and goes off to visit the soil, water and lungs on the way. It transgresses the boundaries between ground and air, inside and outside, resource and threat. Dusty indiscretion reminds us that our bodies and territories aren’t as separate and self-contained as they seem.

I present multi-sited research linking European supply chain transparency practices with insights from field work on Zambian manganese mining. By attending to (1) dispossession, (2) ecological degradation, and (3) commodity export dependence, I demonstrate that transparency is an arena for power struggles at multiple scales, characterized by socially constructed ignorance and a contingent web of pressures that stabilizes extractive relations while rendering them invisible. I argue that transparency configured through an extractive gaze produces de-humanized risk-subjects, proliferates toxic body-territories and generates a growing class of landless people who are surplus to capitalist labor requirements in the age of automation. Herein lies the potential for rupture. The premise of my work is that extractive relations are inherently unstable and identifying the mechanisms that (temporarily) stabilize them is crucial for articulating emancipatory demands.