Women Miners In Developing Countries

Contrary to their masculine portrayal, mines have always employed women in valuable and productive roles. Yet, pit life continues to be represented as a masculine world of work, legitimizing men as the only mineworkers and large, mechanized, and capitalized operations as the only form of mining. Bringing together a range of case studies of women miners from past and present in Asia, the Pacific region, Latin America and Africa, this book makes visible the roles and contributions of women as miners. It also highlights the importance of engendering small and informal mining in the developing world as compared to the early European and American mines. The book shows that women are engaged in various kinds of mining and illustrates how gender and inequality are constructed and sustained in the mines, and also how ethnic identities intersect with those gendered identities.

The purpose of this book is to examine both the positive and negative socioeconomic impacts of artisanal and small-scale mining in developing countries. In recent years, a number of governments have attempted to formalize this rudimentary sector of industry, recognizing its socioeconomic importance. However, the industry continues to be plagued by

Based on studies from countries in Africa, South America and Asia, looks at small-scale mining activities which often are both illegal and environmentally damaging, and dangerous for workers and their communities. Gives an overview on the issues and challenges involved, concluding about how sustainable development can be achieved.

The chapters in this book offer concrete examples from all over the world to show how community livelihoods in mineral-rich tracts can be more sustainable by fully integrating gender concerns into all aspects of the relationship between mining practices and mine affected communities. By looking at the mining industry and the mine-affected communities through a gender lens, the authors indicate a variety of practical strategies to mitigate the impacts of mining on women's livelihoods without undermining women's voice and status within the mine-affected communities. The term 'field' in the title of this volume is not restricted to the open-cut pits of large scale mining operations which are male-dominated workplaces, or with mining as a masculine, capital-intensive industry, but also connotes the wider range of mineral extractive practices which are carried out informally by women and men of artisanal communities at much smaller geographical scales throughout the mineral-rich tracts of poorer countries.

y global social, agrarian and political changes, whilst underlining the roles that local social political-historical contexts play in shaping mineral extractive processes and practices. It shows that the people who are engaged in these mining practices are often the poorest and most exploited labourers-erstwhile peasants caught in the vortex of global change, who perform the most insecure and dangerous tasks. Although these people are located at the margins of mainstream economic life, they collectively produce enormous amounts of diverse material commodities and find a livelihood (and often a pathway out of oppressive poverty). The contributions to this book bring these people to the forefront of debates on resource politics. The contributors are international scholars and practitioners who explore the complexities in the histories, in labour and production practices, the forces driving such mining, the creative agency and capacities of these miners, as well as the human and environmental costs of ASM. They show how these informal, artisanal and small scale miners are inextricably engaged with, or bound to, global commodity values, are intimately involved in the production of new extractive territories and rural economies, and how their labour reshapes agrarian communities and landscapes of resource access and control. This book drives home the understanding that, collectively, this social and economic milieu redefines our conceptualisation of resource politics, mineral dependent livelihoods, extractive geographies of resources and commodities, and their multiple meanings.

The purpose of this book is to examine both the positive and negative socioeconomic impacts of artisanal and small-scale mining in developing countries. In recent years, a number of governments have attempted to formalize this rudimentary sector of industry, recognizing its socioeconomic importance. However, the industry continues to be plagued by

The purpose of this book is to examine both the positive and negative socioeconomic impacts of artisanal and small-scale mining in developing countries. In recent years, a number of governments have attempted to formalize this rudimentary sector of industry, recognizing its socioeconomic importance. However, the industry continues to be plagued by

With little fanfare and profound effect, "family values" have gone global, and the influence of the Christian Right is increasingly felt internationally. This is the first comprehensive study of the Christian Right's global reach and its impact on international law and politics. Doris Buss and Didi Herman explore tensions, contradictions, victories, and defeats for the Christian Right's global project, particularly in the United Nations. The authors consult Christian Right materials, from pamphlets to novels; conduct interviews with people in the movement; and provide a firsthand account of the World Congress of Families II in 1999, a key event in formulating Christian Right global policy and strategy. The result is a detailed look at a new global player--its campaigns against women's rights, population policy, and gay and lesbian rights; its efforts to build an alliance of orthodox faiths with non-Christians; and the tensions and strains as it seeks to negotiate a role for conservative Christianity in a changing global order.

The chapters in this book provide in- depth insight into the gender norms and contexts in which women work in the expanding informal mining sector in sub- Saharan Africa. Collectively, the research here provides a nuanced account of women’s livelihood strategies in artisanal and small- scale mining (ASM, as its generally known) in ways that challenge images of women— as either victimized by mining or empowered by mining livelihoods, or both— that tend to dominate the growing array of donor and policy interventions in this sector. The authors come from different disciplinary traditions— anthropology, economics, political science, mining engineering, law— but all place questions of gendered power front and centre in their analyses of sociocultural, institutional, economic and political relationships, practices and arrangements within which women navigate their mining livelihoods. The physical or representational presence (and sometimes absence) of women in ASM sites is a linking theme, with the chapters exploring different dimensions of mining and gender— the gendered divisions of labour, migration, land ownership, cultural norms, and gendered authority relations— but also how ‘women’ materialize and are seen and unseen in the growing array of transnational interventions in this sector. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Canadian Journal of African Studies.

The Covid-19 pandemic showed that a patriarchal capitalist socio-economic system is unable to address the socio-ecological reproduction need of societies. This volume foregrounds the possibilities emancipatory feminism creates by resisting neo-liberalism through grassroots and indigenous activism. The Covid-19 pandemic threw into stark relief the multi-dimensional threats created by neoliberal capitalism. Government measures to alleviate the crisis were largely inadequate, leaving women – in particular working-class women – to carry the increased burden of care work while at the same time placing themselves in direct risk as frontline workers. Emancipatory Feminism in the Time of Covid-19, the seventh volume in the Democratic Marxism series, explores how many subaltern women – working class, peasant and indigenous –challenge hegemonic neoliberal feminism through their resistance to ordinary capitalist practices and ecological extractivism. Contributors cover women’s responses in a wide range of contexts: from women leading the defence of Rojava – the Kurdish region of Syria, to approaches to anti-capitalist ecology and building food secure pathways in communities across Africa, to championing climate justice in mining affected communities and transforming gender divisions in mining labour practices in South Africa, to contesting macro-economic policies affecting the working conditions of nurses. Their practices demonstrate a feminist understanding of the current systemic crises of capitalism and patriarchal oppression. What is offered in this collection is a subaltern women’s grassroots resistance focused on advancing and enabling solidarity-based political projects, deepening democracy, building capacities and alliances to advance new feminist alternatives.