Presentation long abstract

Amidst global calls for "greening" and decarbonizing industries, particularly within frameworks like the European Green Deal, critical examination of their implications in the Global South remains imperative. This paper interrogates the political economy of green sustainable mining through decolonial feminist geographies, revealing how discourses of sustainable mining reproduce colonial territorialization and capitalist accumulation.

Centering iron ore extraction in Odisha, India—where Adivasi (such as Munda, Gond and Paudi bhuiyan) and Dalit communities face dispossession from forested mineral-rich lands—I deploy decolonial feminist political ecology to critique green industrial transitions that reproduce colonial, gendered, and caste-based environmental violence. Drawing on fieldwork in Sundargarh district's Koida block, I analyze how Adivasi women mine workers and anti-mining activists navigate intersecting structures of patriarchy, caste hierarchy, and extractive capitalism.

"Green" or "sustainable" mining operates as colonial continuity through resource appropriation, increasing labor precarity, ecological destruction, and caste and gender-based violence. Through a decolonial feminist intersectional lens, I examine how Adivasi women's reproductive and wage labor gets explioted in the mining sector, while anti-mining activists defend Jal-Jangal-Zameen (water-forests-land) through collective popular protests against mining companies.

Theoretically, this paper bridges Black geographies literature with scholarship on caste and indigeneity to unpack how "green" mining operates through environmental racism alongside patriarchal and caste-based ideologies. This research contributes to decolonial feminist geographical scholarship by demonstrating how Adivasi women negotiate and challenge extractive logics, creating alternative spatial practices that contest violence embedded in green industrial capitalism and envision liberatory ecological futures.