Presentation short abstract

This paper examines logics of rehabilitation in relation to land damaged by mineral extraction and drill rig workers’ bodies. Promises of rehabilitation allow damage to land and labour to occur in the first place and masculinity plays a key role in rig workers’ willingness to break their bodies.

Presentation long abstract

This paper examines logics of rehabilitation as they relate to land damaged by mining activity and to the worn-out bodies of drill rig workers. It examines claims that mining can repair damage done to the land and return land to its pre-mining state (and even ecologically improve the land); and parallel notions that bodies, abused during work in the mining industry, can be repaired by medicine. Drawing on ethnographic research on a drill site in ‘Australia’ in 2023, where a drill rig prototype for mineral exploration was being tested, the paper shows how the breaking of land and bodies is directly connected (the redirected energy used to break the land during drilling is what breaks the bodies of drill workers). It further shows that these discourses of rehabilitation allow the damage to both land and labour to occur in the first place – rehabilitation discourses reassure communities and mine workers that they can break their land/bodies, with the promise of their future repair. I argue that masculinity plays a key role in drill rig workers’ willingness to break their bodies for capital accumulation (and settler colonial land appropriation by mining); workers performed various masculinities, navigating tensions between the desire to exhibit macho traits, and the desire to protect their bodies. This paper intervenes in debates on the possibilities of regeneration from colonial capitalist ruination (Tsing 2003, Khayyat 2022) and in recent literature on the intersections between disability studies, masculinity studies and political ecology.