Sam Spiegel | University of Edinburgh (original) (raw)

Papers by Sam Spiegel

Geoforum, 2017

Academics across disciplines are increasingly employing political ecology lenses to unpack confli... more Academics across disciplines are increasingly employing political ecology lenses to unpack conflicts related to resource extraction. Yet, an area that remains under-researched and under-theorised is how environmental impact assessments (EIAs) are embedded in politics and imagined as sites of power relations. Drawing on longterm fieldwork in Zimbabwe engaging small-scale gold miners, EIA consultants and government officials, this article examines the changing social significance of EIAs during and after a nationwide police operation that was framed by authorities as targeting non-compliance with environmental policy, illegal mining and illicit trading. Among other articulations of dissent, small-scale miners associations protested that EIA enforcement rhetoric served unjustly as a rationale for halting livelihoods and extracting rent from miners in times of economic difficulty. The article challenges EIA narratives that focus narrowly on risk management or governance failure, exploring technocratic obfuscations and how enforcement rhetoric was perceived in relation to criminalisation and coercion, expert environmental consultancy cultures and adapted legacies of colonial practice in contemporary dynamics of rule. Heavy-handed policing under the banner of enforcing order impinged on livelihoods and had counterproductive effects in addressing environmental problems, while complying with expensive EIA report-producing requirements was far beyond the means of most small-scale miners. The article rethinks how technical EIA rhetoric becomes entangled in spaces of contentious politics, the perils of looking only at particular scales of relations to the exclusion of others, and what it means to re-engage Donald Moore's notion of "shifting alignments and contingent constellations of power." Suggesting future directions in political ecology theorising in relation to extractive sectors, it calls for careful attention to the situated politics of EIAssituated in time and space, amid varying relations of powerand how multiple hegemonic practices are conceptualised and challenged.

Energy Research & Social Science, 2021

While controversial plans for fossil fuel pipeline-building continue across Indigenous lands with... more While controversial plans for fossil fuel pipeline-building continue across Indigenous lands without consent, how are visual practicesincluding watching and witnessingserving as modes of resistance? Drawing on a participant-observation ethnography over the 2018-2021 period with environmental defenders on Coast Salish land, in what is colonially called 'British Columbia, Canada', this article offers a lens for exploring visual realms of resistance amid expanding extractivism, police surveillance and reconfigured pipeline opposition during the COVID-19 pandemic. Grassroots photography in land-based monitoring, artistic communication in and around courtrooms and other visual practices have been serving as powerful inflection points, countering multiple facets of petro-colonialismecological destruction, health threats, and moral and legal transgressions by companies and state institutions. They have also been stimulating new collective actions, some led by Indigenous land protectors extending longstanding traditions of protecting human and non-human life. As 'more-than-representational', visual encounters can be active players in constructing knowledge, challenging structures of dispossession, genocide and ecocide, and cultivating understandings of care, sovereignty, climate justice and anti-colonial solidarity from heterogeneous vantage points. Some environmental defenders' visual creativities invite deep reflection on ontologies rooted in reciprocity and respect that are thoroughly ignored in extractivist settler-colonial cultures. The article situates visual strategies in fraught political contexts of ramped-up police and corporate surveillance targeting Indigenous land protectors and other environmental defenders, underscoring critical concern about superficial optical allyship and hollow gestures by state actors responding to racism and state violence on Indigenous land. It calls for attention to dialectical relationships amongst state visual tactics and counter-hegemonic visual practices in struggles to resist colonial energy regimes and to cultivate efforts towards alternative, less destructive energy futures. 2021 on Indigenous landsin what is now colonially called 'British Columbia' (by the Government of Canada to describe the western-most province of its federation). My overarching aim here is to explore how critical visual thinking

Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2019

Practices of visually representing places of resource extraction and land degradation can be deep... more Practices of visually representing places of resource extraction and land degradation can be deeply contentious, embedded in a wide variety of values, ethics, goals, and relations. Photographs are pervasively used to generate narratives about environmental change, particular social groups, and places. Yet, the sociocultural processes and power relations at play in producing "visual knowledge" and interpreting images often remain underexplored, with limited attention to how photographs and visual storytelling are engaged to (re)orient discussions about change. Challenging ways of seeing, this article discusses relational practices around photography and the narrating, experiencing, and circulating of images. It explores experiences with photovoice-a methodology aimed at realigning the dynamics of who decides what photos matter, how, why, and with what implications, sometimes pitched as a way to "decolonize" research. The study examines interactions in a village in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia, where women shared visual stories to express challenges they face in relation to deforestation and other landscape changes, depleted gold deposits, limited livelihood options, and other themes, conveying place histories and ideas about home, identity, governance, and community. Reflecting on intergenerational dialogues and anxieties about the future, the analysis considers photovoice processes in refracting everyday struggles, arguing for feminist epistemologies that carefully attend to the situated ethics and contingent performative powers of visual storytelling where multiple forms of resource extraction powerfully shape community life. The article calls for greater focus on women's place-based storytelling and its communicative power, highlighting the significance of positionality when studying socioecological visualization, affect, and change.

Geography Compass, 2022

In recent years, critical border studies have developed sophisticated concepts and methodologies ... more In recent years, critical border studies have developed sophisticated concepts and methodologies for exploring the multifaceted spatialities, sociologies and temporalities of contemporary borders. In this article, we consider how the “aesthetic turn” that has gained prominence in the scholarship can further inform thinking in border studies. Specifically, we focus on the role of the visual in the construction as well as subversion of borders, suggesting possible avenues for future critical aesthetics-engaged research on COVID-19 era border reconfigurations. To do so, we first briefly outline the theoretical evolution of border studies, paying attention to recent conceptualisations of borders as dynamic processes of social and spatial differentiation. We then build on the borderscapes concept to unpack research on border aesthetics, with particular attention to the heterogeneous roles played by visual objects such as maps, photographs and videos in shaping both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic processes of bordering. Finally, we bring these contributions into discussion with recent insights on the COVID-19 pandemic, sketching several ways to advance aesthetic concepts and methodologies in academic research on borderscapes that are emerging with, and will likely outlast, the pandemic. We suggest that border studies and affiliated sub-fields can gain useful insights from attending more explicitly and robustly to dynamic visual geographies of power, contestation and subversion.

In recent years, critical border studies have developed sophisticated concepts and methodologies ... more In recent years, critical border studies have developed sophisticated concepts and methodologies for exploring the multifaceted spatialities, sociologies and temporalities of contemporary borders. In this article, we consider how the "aesthetic turn" that has gained prominence in the scholarship can further inform thinking in border studies. Specifically, we focus on the role of the visual in the construction as well as subversion of borders, suggesting possible avenues for future critical aesthetics-engaged research on COVID-19 era border reconfigurations. To do so, we first briefly outline the theoretical evolution of border studies, paying attention to recent conceptualisations of borders as dynamic processes of social and spatial differentiation. We then build on the borderscapes concept to unpack research on border aesthetics, with particular attention to the heterogeneous roles played by visual objects such as maps, photographs and videos in shaping both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic processes of bordering. Finally, we bring these contributions into discussion with recent insights on the COVID-19 pandemic, sketching several ways to advance aesthetic concepts and methodologies in academic research on borderscapes that are emerging with, and will likely outlast, the pandemic. We suggest that border studies and

The Extractive Industries and Society

Abstract Whereas much literature on traditional leaders and mining centres on land alienation and... more Abstract Whereas much literature on traditional leaders and mining centres on land alienation and displacement, less has focused explicitly on the interface between traditional leaders, articulations of belonging and local labour recruitment dynamics. Using the case of Zimbabwe Platinum Mines Holdings Limited (Zimplats)’s platinum mining operations in Mhondoro-Ngezi district in Zimbabwe, this article analyses the centrality of the politics of belonging in the platinum mining industry’s local labour recruitment regimes. The article examines how traditional leaders use autochthonous claims to land to negotiate access to jobs for job-seekers under their jurisdiction and also explores the flaws and contradictions within the local labour recruitment regimes set up by mining companies to appease local communities. The relationship between mining capital and traditional leaders resulted in the emergence of a local labour recruitment regime in which traditional leaders played a significant role. Traditional leaders’ demands for jobs from mining companies whose activities led to their displacement can be viewed as a form of ‘insurgent citizenship’ which led to greater access to mining jobs by local communities. As demonstrated in this study, local communities’ access to mining jobs should not be viewed as a result of the corporate paternalism of mining companies, but coordinated efforts by traditional leaders and local communities who lost their land to mining operations. The article also highlights the fraught nature of a local labour recruitment regime that is centred on traditional leaders. Apart from instances of corruption in how traditional leaders manage the local labour recruitment system, the article also highlights the contentious nature of the psychomotor tests used by the mining company in recruiting labour.

GeoJournal, 2021

Forced displacement and resettlement is a pervasive challenge being contemplated across the socia... more Forced displacement and resettlement is a pervasive challenge being contemplated across the social sciences. Scholarly literature, however, often fails to engage complexities of power in understanding socio-environmental interactions in resettlement processes. Addressing Zimbabwe's Tokwe-Mukosi flood disaster resettlement, we explore hegemonic uses of state power during the pre-and post-flood induced resettlement processes. We examine how state power exercised through local government, financial, and security institutions impacts community vulnerabilities during forced resettlement processes, while furthering capitalist agendas, drawing insights from analysing narratives between 2010 and 2021. Concerns abound that multiple ministries, the police, and the army undermined displaced people's resilience, including through inadequate compensation, with state institutions neglecting displaced communities during encampment by inadequately meeting physical security, health, educational, and livestock production needs. We explore how forcibly resettling encamped households to a disputed location is not only an ongoing perceived injustice regionally but also a continuing reference point in resettlement discussions countrywide, reflecting concerns that land use and economic reconfigurations in resettlement can undermine subsistence livelihoods while privileging certain values and interests over others. Policy lessons highlight the need for reviewing disaster management legislation, developing compensation guidelines and reviewing encampment practices. Analytically, lessons point to how state power may be studied in relation to perspectives on the destruction of flood survivors' connections to place, people and livelihoods, underscoring the critical need for theorising the relationships between power dynamics and diverse experiences around displacement.

Energy Research & Social Science, 2021

While controversial plans for fossil fuel pipeline-building continue across Indigenous lands with... more While controversial plans for fossil fuel pipeline-building continue across Indigenous lands without consent, how are visual practicesincluding watching and witnessingserving as modes of resistance? Drawing on a participant-observation ethnography over the 2018-2021 period with environmental defenders on Coast Salish land, in what is colonially called 'British Columbia, Canada', this article offers a lens for exploring visual realms of resistance amid expanding extractivism, police surveillance and reconfigured pipeline opposition during the COVID-19 pandemic. Grassroots photography in land-based monitoring, artistic communication in and around courtrooms and other visual practices have been serving as powerful inflection points, countering multiple facets of petro-colonialismecological destruction, health threats, and moral and legal transgressions by companies and state institutions. They have also been stimulating new collective actions, some led by Indigenous land protectors extending longstanding traditions of protecting human and non-human life. As 'more-than-representational', visual encounters can be active players in constructing knowledge, challenging structures of dispossession, genocide and ecocide, and cultivating understandings of care, sovereignty, climate justice and anti-colonial solidarity from heterogeneous vantage points. Some environmental defenders' visual creativities invite deep reflection on ontologies rooted in reciprocity and respect that are thoroughly ignored in extractivist settler-colonial cultures. The article situates visual strategies in fraught political contexts of ramped-up police and corporate surveillance targeting Indigenous land protectors and other environmental defenders, underscoring critical concern about superficial optical allyship and hollow gestures by state actors responding to racism and state violence on Indigenous land. It calls for attention to dialectical relationships amongst state visual tactics and counter-hegemonic visual practices in struggles to resist colonial energy regimes and to cultivate efforts towards alternative, less destructive energy futures.

Political Geography, 2021

As plans for expanding fossil fuel infrastructure continue to ramp up despite threats to the plan... more As plans for expanding fossil fuel infrastructure continue to ramp up despite threats to the planet, how are geographers to address the criminalisation and prosecution of peaceful acts of defending earth, water and land? Reflecting on a courtroom ethnography and debates spanning legal geography, political ecology and social movements studies, this article explores embodied struggles around oil, ‘justice’ and geographies of caring – discussing how Indigenous youth, grandmothers in their eighties and others were convicted of ‘criminal contempt’ for being on a road near an oil pipeline expansion project. The project (“Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion”) was created to transport unprecedented levels of heavy oil (bitumen) across hundreds of kilometres of Indigenous peoples' territory that was never ceded to settler-colonial authorities in Canada. Focusing on a controversial injunction designed to protect oil industry expansion, the discussion explores the performativity of a judge's exercise of power, including in denying the necessity to act defence, side-lining Indigenous jurisdiction, and escalating prison sentences. Courtroom ethnography offers a unique vantage point for witnessing power at work and vast resources used by state actors to suppress issues fundamental to the United Nations Declaration on Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the Paris Climate Accord. It also provides a lens into the intersectional solidarity and ethics of care among those who dare to challenge colonialism and hyper-extractivism, inviting engagement with multiple meanings of ‘irreparable harm’ at various scales. The article calls for more attention to power relations, values and affects shaping courtroom dynamics in an age in which fossil fuel interests, climate crisis and settler-colonial control over courts are entwined in evermore-complex violent entanglements.

International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2020

Visual practices of representing fossil fuel projects are entangled in diverse values and relatio... more Visual practices of representing fossil fuel projects are entangled in diverse values and relations that often go underexplored. In Canada, visual media campaigns to aggressively push forward the fossil fuel industry not only relegate to obscurity indigenous values but mask evidence on health impacts as well as the aspirations of those most affected, including indigenous communities whose food sovereignty and stewardship relationship to the land continues to be affronted by oil pipeline expansion. The Tsleil-Waututh Nation, based at the terminal of the Trans Mountain Pipeline in Canada, has been at the forefront of struggles against the pipeline expansion. Contributing to geographical, environmental studies, and public health research grappling with the performativity of images, this article explores stories conveying health, environmental, and intergenerational justice concerns on indigenous territory. Adapting photovoice techniques, elders and youth illustrated how the environment has changed over time; impacts on sovereignty-both food sovereignty and more broadly; concepts of health, well-being and deep cultural connection with water; and visions for future relationships. We explore the importance of an intergenerational lens of connectedness to nature and sustainability, discussing visual storytelling not just as visual counter-narrative (to neocolonial extractivism) but also as an invitation into fundamentally different ways of seeing and interacting.

Journal of Public Health Policy, 2019

Energy projects may profoundly impact Indigenous peoples. We consider effects of Canada's propose... more Energy projects may profoundly impact Indigenous peoples. We consider effects of Canada's proposed Trans Mountain oil pipeline expansion on the health and food sovereignty of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation (TWN) through contamination and impeded access to uncontaminated traditional foods. Federal monitoring and TWN documentation show elevated shellfish biotoxin levels in TWN's traditional territory near the terminus where crude oil is piped. Although TWN restoration work has reopened some shellfish-harvesting sites, pipeline expansion stands to increase health risk directly through rising bioaccumulating chemical toxins as well as through increased hazardous biotoxins. Climate change from increased fossil fuel use, expected via pipeline expansion, also threatens to increase algae blooms through higher temperature and nutrient loading. As the environmental impact assessment process failed to effectively consider these local health concerns in addition to larger impacts of climate change, new assessment is needed attending to linked issues of equity, sustainability and Indigenous food sovereignty.

Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2019

Practices of visually representing places of resource extraction and land degradation can be deep... more Practices of visually representing places of resource extraction and land degradation can be deeply contentious, embedded in a wide variety of values, ethics, goals, and relations. Photographs are pervasively used to generate narratives about environmental change, particular social groups, and places. Yet, the sociocultural processes and power relations at play in producing “visual knowledge” and interpreting images often remain underexplored, with limited attention to how photographs and visual storytelling are engaged to (re)orient discussions about change. Challenging ways of seeing, this article discusses relational practices around photography and the narrating, experiencing, and circulating of images. It explores experiences with photovoice—a methodology aimed at realigning the dynamics of who decides what photos matter, how, why, and with what implications, sometimes pitched as a way to “decolonize” research. The study examines interactions in a village in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia, where women shared visual stories to express challenges they face in relation to deforestation and other landscape changes, depleted gold deposits, limited livelihood options, and other themes, conveying place histories and ideas about home, identity, governance, and community. Reflecting on intergenerational dialogues and anxieties about the future, the analysis considers photovoice processes in refracting everyday struggles, arguing for feminist epistemologies that carefully attend to the situated ethics and contingent performative powers of visual storytelling where multiple forms of resource extraction powerfully shape community life. The article calls for greater focus on women’s place-based storytelling and its communicative power, highlighting the significance of positionality when studying socioecological visualization, affect, and change. Key Words: feminist visualization, Indonesia, participatory visual methods, photovoice, resource extraction.

Global Environmental Politics, 2019

In the wake of the Paris Agreement on climate change, promises to phase out coal-fired power have... more In the wake of the Paris Agreement on climate change, promises to phase out coal-fired power have suggested cause for optimism around energy transition globally. However, coal remains entangled with contentious development agendas in many parts of the world, while fossil fuel industries continue to flourish. This article discusses these entan- glements through a climate justice lens that engages the cultural politics surrounding coal and energy transition. We highlight how recent struggles around phasing out coal have stimulated renewed critical debates around colonialism, empire, and capitalism more broadly, recognizing climate change as an intersectional issue encompassing racial, gender, and economic justice. With social movements locked in struggles to resist the development or expansion of coal mines, power plants, and associated infrastructure, we unpack tensions that emerge as transnational alliances connect disparate communi- ties across the world. Our conclusion signals the need for greater critical engagement with how intersecting inequalities are coded into the cultural politics of coal, and how this shapes efforts to pursue a just transition.

GeoJournal, 2018

Various critiques of transboundary natural resource governance in southern Africa have questioned... more Various critiques of transboundary natural resource governance in southern Africa have questioned the efficacy and social equity dimensions of prevailing strategies for protecting transnational ecosystems, highlighting the importance of sociological research on the potentially 'other-ing' impacts of mainstream conservation policy discourse. We draw on research in the Chimanimani Trans-Frontier Conservation Area (TFCA) on both sides of the Zim-babwe–Mozambique border, scrutinizing simplifications inherent in terms such as ''illegal foreigners'' that obfuscate histories and contemporary realities of cross-border social ties. Engaging perspectives of park authorities and chiefs as well as people who have taken up artisanal mining, we explore two related themes—how 'belonging' is negotiated as well as how conservation agendas are instrumentalized by state and non-state actors. Bringing attention to gaps between policy discourses surrounding TFCAs and territorialized practices of exclusion, the article concludes by calling for greater attention to the mutating significance of colonially established boundaries as well as the dynamic influences of social networks in borderland spaces.

A B S T R A C T Academics across disciplines are increasingly employing political ecology lenses ... more A B S T R A C T Academics across disciplines are increasingly employing political ecology lenses to unpack conflicts related to resource extraction. Yet, an area that remains under-researched and under-theorised is how environmental impact assessments (EIAs) are embedded in politics and imagined as sites of power relations. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in Zimbabwe engaging small-scale gold miners, EIA consultants and government officials, this article examines the changing social significance of EIAs during and after a nationwide police operation that was framed by authorities as targeting non-compliance with environmental policy, illegal mining and illicit trading. Among other articulations of dissent, small-scale miners associations protested that EIA enforcement rhetoric served unjustly as a rationale for halting livelihoods and extracting rent from miners in times of economic difficulty. The article challenges EIA narratives that focus narrowly on risk management or governance failure, exploring technocratic obfuscations and how enforcement rhetoric was perceived in relation to criminalisation and coercion, expert environmental consultancy cultures and adapted legacies of colonial practice in contemporary dynamics of rule. Heavy-handed policing under the banner of enforcing order impinged on livelihoods and had counterproductive effects in addressing environmental problems, while complying with expensive EIA report-producing requirements was far beyond the means of most small-scale miners. The article rethinks how technical EIA rhetoric becomes entangled in spaces of contentious politics, the perils of looking only at particular scales of relations to the exclusion of others, and what it means to re-engage Donald Moore's notion of " shifting alignments and contingent constellations of power. " Suggesting future directions in political ecology theorising in relation to extractive sectors, it calls for careful attention to the situated politics of EIAs – situated in time and space, amid varying relations of power – and how multiple hegemonic practices are con-ceptualised and challenged.

Ecological Economics

A B S T R A C T This article uses an ecological economics approach to analyse tensions surroundin... more A B S T R A C T This article uses an ecological economics approach to analyse tensions surrounding efforts to phase out mercury in Indonesia's artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) sector, among the largest sources of mercury pollution worldwide. Many scholars and environmental activists have long hoped that global restrictions in mercury trade would drive up mercury prices and decrease mercury use and pollution in ASGM. However, in Indonesia, despite global mercury trade restrictions, recent increases in domestic mercury supplies through new cinnabar mining developments have made mercury less expensive and more available, destabilizing efforts at reducing mercury use. This article discusses implications of domestic cinnabar mining for controlling mercury in Indonesia's ASGM sector, highlighting obstacles to implementing the Minamata Convention, a treaty that aims to restrict mercury use. We link discussion of mercury mining to other socioeconomic processes, labour relations and power dynamics shaping mercury use in gold mining and hindering collectivised mercury-free technology uptake. Examining new evidence regarding the social metabolism of a changing extractive economy, we underscore why an integrated ecological economics paradigm – carefully grounding analysis in the context of local labour situations – is needed to challenge assumptions and inform new strategies for mercury reduction/elim-ination in ASGM.

Geoforum, 2017

A B S T R A C T This article examines the social and material politics of coal, focusing on mobil... more A B S T R A C T This article examines the social and material politics of coal, focusing on mobilizations against opencast mining in the United Kingdom and Indonesia. Contested spaces and practices elicited by coal extraction provide important openings through which to understand how 'hydrocarbon modernity' is experienced and entangled with different processes of neoliberal capitalism. We investigate resistance against coal at Ffos-y-Fran in South Wales and the IndoMet project in the Indonesian province of Central Kalimantan, exploring how assemblages of protest have challenged the material effects, discursive practices and regimes of accumulation attendant within the coal industry. In both countries, campaigns seeking to 'end coal' have built dynamic geographical alliances, and as collective challenges to mining activities have unfolded, we consider how movements targeting specific sites of extraction have sought to disrupt the industry's 'dis-embedding' of coal from the landscape. Drawing on accounts of how hydrocarbon politics shape societies, the approach we present draws attention to changing linkages between economic, environmental and social advocacy while illuminating the varied ways in which coal mining can compound and perpetuate inequality.

Academics in high-income countries are increasingly launching development studies programmes thro... more Academics in high-income countries are increasingly launching development studies programmes through online distance learning to engage practitioner-students in low-income countries. Are such initiatives providing opportunities to critically tackle social injustice, or merely ‘mirroring’ relations of global inequality and re-entrenching imperial practices? Building on recent scholarship addressing efforts to ‘decolonise development studies’ and the complex power dynamics they encounter, we reflect on this question by analysing experiences of faculty and students in a United Kingdom-based online development studies programme, focusing particularly on perspectives of development practitioner-students working from Africa. We discuss barriers to social inclusivity – including the politics of language – that shaped participation dynamics in the programme as well as debates regarding critical development course content, rethinking possibilities for bridging counter-hegemonic development scholarship with practice-oriented approaches in a range of social contexts. Our analysis unpacks key tensions in addressing intertwined institutional and pedagogic dilemmas for an agenda towards decolonising online development studies, positioning decolonisation as a necessarily unsettling and contested process that calls for greater self-reflexivity.

There has recently been much debate about the ways in which place-based research should contextua... more There has recently been much debate about the ways in which place-based research should contextualize rural land use disputes in relation to economic globalization. This article analyzes how changing hybrid configurations of global and regional influences in Cambodia's extractive sector have transformed the dilemmas of rural place-making, focussing on two cases – a Chinese mining company's concession in Kratie and an Australian mining company's concession in Ratanakiri. Addressing contexts where resource access has been contested by local Khmer small-scale gold mining communities, migrant miners and foreign-owned companies, the case studies illustrate how globalization pressures have been experienced differently. The cases also highlight analytic weaknesses of dominant development narratives that focus narrowly on local illegal land use and the need for resettlement of communities living and working in large companies' concessions. The article introduces a framework of three inter-related themes that encourage a more sensitive interpretation of extractive sector contestations under globalization, calling for critically engaging divergent interpretations of “illegality” in resource use, exploring the dynamic interactions between global and regional actors, and carefully considering small-scale miners' socioeconomic and historical connections to rural places. As this is the first study in almost a decade to focus on social dimensions of Cambodia's mining industry, the article concludes by suggesting how place-based research attuned to ever-changing faces of globalization can deepen understandings of socioeconomic marginalization and transformation in Cambodia's mineral-rich areas and beyond.

Geoforum, 2017

Academics across disciplines are increasingly employing political ecology lenses to unpack confli... more Academics across disciplines are increasingly employing political ecology lenses to unpack conflicts related to resource extraction. Yet, an area that remains under-researched and under-theorised is how environmental impact assessments (EIAs) are embedded in politics and imagined as sites of power relations. Drawing on longterm fieldwork in Zimbabwe engaging small-scale gold miners, EIA consultants and government officials, this article examines the changing social significance of EIAs during and after a nationwide police operation that was framed by authorities as targeting non-compliance with environmental policy, illegal mining and illicit trading. Among other articulations of dissent, small-scale miners associations protested that EIA enforcement rhetoric served unjustly as a rationale for halting livelihoods and extracting rent from miners in times of economic difficulty. The article challenges EIA narratives that focus narrowly on risk management or governance failure, exploring technocratic obfuscations and how enforcement rhetoric was perceived in relation to criminalisation and coercion, expert environmental consultancy cultures and adapted legacies of colonial practice in contemporary dynamics of rule. Heavy-handed policing under the banner of enforcing order impinged on livelihoods and had counterproductive effects in addressing environmental problems, while complying with expensive EIA report-producing requirements was far beyond the means of most small-scale miners. The article rethinks how technical EIA rhetoric becomes entangled in spaces of contentious politics, the perils of looking only at particular scales of relations to the exclusion of others, and what it means to re-engage Donald Moore's notion of "shifting alignments and contingent constellations of power." Suggesting future directions in political ecology theorising in relation to extractive sectors, it calls for careful attention to the situated politics of EIAssituated in time and space, amid varying relations of powerand how multiple hegemonic practices are conceptualised and challenged.

Energy Research & Social Science, 2021

While controversial plans for fossil fuel pipeline-building continue across Indigenous lands with... more While controversial plans for fossil fuel pipeline-building continue across Indigenous lands without consent, how are visual practicesincluding watching and witnessingserving as modes of resistance? Drawing on a participant-observation ethnography over the 2018-2021 period with environmental defenders on Coast Salish land, in what is colonially called 'British Columbia, Canada', this article offers a lens for exploring visual realms of resistance amid expanding extractivism, police surveillance and reconfigured pipeline opposition during the COVID-19 pandemic. Grassroots photography in land-based monitoring, artistic communication in and around courtrooms and other visual practices have been serving as powerful inflection points, countering multiple facets of petro-colonialismecological destruction, health threats, and moral and legal transgressions by companies and state institutions. They have also been stimulating new collective actions, some led by Indigenous land protectors extending longstanding traditions of protecting human and non-human life. As 'more-than-representational', visual encounters can be active players in constructing knowledge, challenging structures of dispossession, genocide and ecocide, and cultivating understandings of care, sovereignty, climate justice and anti-colonial solidarity from heterogeneous vantage points. Some environmental defenders' visual creativities invite deep reflection on ontologies rooted in reciprocity and respect that are thoroughly ignored in extractivist settler-colonial cultures. The article situates visual strategies in fraught political contexts of ramped-up police and corporate surveillance targeting Indigenous land protectors and other environmental defenders, underscoring critical concern about superficial optical allyship and hollow gestures by state actors responding to racism and state violence on Indigenous land. It calls for attention to dialectical relationships amongst state visual tactics and counter-hegemonic visual practices in struggles to resist colonial energy regimes and to cultivate efforts towards alternative, less destructive energy futures. 2021 on Indigenous landsin what is now colonially called 'British Columbia' (by the Government of Canada to describe the western-most province of its federation). My overarching aim here is to explore how critical visual thinking

Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2019

Practices of visually representing places of resource extraction and land degradation can be deep... more Practices of visually representing places of resource extraction and land degradation can be deeply contentious, embedded in a wide variety of values, ethics, goals, and relations. Photographs are pervasively used to generate narratives about environmental change, particular social groups, and places. Yet, the sociocultural processes and power relations at play in producing "visual knowledge" and interpreting images often remain underexplored, with limited attention to how photographs and visual storytelling are engaged to (re)orient discussions about change. Challenging ways of seeing, this article discusses relational practices around photography and the narrating, experiencing, and circulating of images. It explores experiences with photovoice-a methodology aimed at realigning the dynamics of who decides what photos matter, how, why, and with what implications, sometimes pitched as a way to "decolonize" research. The study examines interactions in a village in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia, where women shared visual stories to express challenges they face in relation to deforestation and other landscape changes, depleted gold deposits, limited livelihood options, and other themes, conveying place histories and ideas about home, identity, governance, and community. Reflecting on intergenerational dialogues and anxieties about the future, the analysis considers photovoice processes in refracting everyday struggles, arguing for feminist epistemologies that carefully attend to the situated ethics and contingent performative powers of visual storytelling where multiple forms of resource extraction powerfully shape community life. The article calls for greater focus on women's place-based storytelling and its communicative power, highlighting the significance of positionality when studying socioecological visualization, affect, and change.

Geography Compass, 2022

In recent years, critical border studies have developed sophisticated concepts and methodologies ... more In recent years, critical border studies have developed sophisticated concepts and methodologies for exploring the multifaceted spatialities, sociologies and temporalities of contemporary borders. In this article, we consider how the “aesthetic turn” that has gained prominence in the scholarship can further inform thinking in border studies. Specifically, we focus on the role of the visual in the construction as well as subversion of borders, suggesting possible avenues for future critical aesthetics-engaged research on COVID-19 era border reconfigurations. To do so, we first briefly outline the theoretical evolution of border studies, paying attention to recent conceptualisations of borders as dynamic processes of social and spatial differentiation. We then build on the borderscapes concept to unpack research on border aesthetics, with particular attention to the heterogeneous roles played by visual objects such as maps, photographs and videos in shaping both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic processes of bordering. Finally, we bring these contributions into discussion with recent insights on the COVID-19 pandemic, sketching several ways to advance aesthetic concepts and methodologies in academic research on borderscapes that are emerging with, and will likely outlast, the pandemic. We suggest that border studies and affiliated sub-fields can gain useful insights from attending more explicitly and robustly to dynamic visual geographies of power, contestation and subversion.

In recent years, critical border studies have developed sophisticated concepts and methodologies ... more In recent years, critical border studies have developed sophisticated concepts and methodologies for exploring the multifaceted spatialities, sociologies and temporalities of contemporary borders. In this article, we consider how the "aesthetic turn" that has gained prominence in the scholarship can further inform thinking in border studies. Specifically, we focus on the role of the visual in the construction as well as subversion of borders, suggesting possible avenues for future critical aesthetics-engaged research on COVID-19 era border reconfigurations. To do so, we first briefly outline the theoretical evolution of border studies, paying attention to recent conceptualisations of borders as dynamic processes of social and spatial differentiation. We then build on the borderscapes concept to unpack research on border aesthetics, with particular attention to the heterogeneous roles played by visual objects such as maps, photographs and videos in shaping both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic processes of bordering. Finally, we bring these contributions into discussion with recent insights on the COVID-19 pandemic, sketching several ways to advance aesthetic concepts and methodologies in academic research on borderscapes that are emerging with, and will likely outlast, the pandemic. We suggest that border studies and

The Extractive Industries and Society

Abstract Whereas much literature on traditional leaders and mining centres on land alienation and... more Abstract Whereas much literature on traditional leaders and mining centres on land alienation and displacement, less has focused explicitly on the interface between traditional leaders, articulations of belonging and local labour recruitment dynamics. Using the case of Zimbabwe Platinum Mines Holdings Limited (Zimplats)’s platinum mining operations in Mhondoro-Ngezi district in Zimbabwe, this article analyses the centrality of the politics of belonging in the platinum mining industry’s local labour recruitment regimes. The article examines how traditional leaders use autochthonous claims to land to negotiate access to jobs for job-seekers under their jurisdiction and also explores the flaws and contradictions within the local labour recruitment regimes set up by mining companies to appease local communities. The relationship between mining capital and traditional leaders resulted in the emergence of a local labour recruitment regime in which traditional leaders played a significant role. Traditional leaders’ demands for jobs from mining companies whose activities led to their displacement can be viewed as a form of ‘insurgent citizenship’ which led to greater access to mining jobs by local communities. As demonstrated in this study, local communities’ access to mining jobs should not be viewed as a result of the corporate paternalism of mining companies, but coordinated efforts by traditional leaders and local communities who lost their land to mining operations. The article also highlights the fraught nature of a local labour recruitment regime that is centred on traditional leaders. Apart from instances of corruption in how traditional leaders manage the local labour recruitment system, the article also highlights the contentious nature of the psychomotor tests used by the mining company in recruiting labour.

GeoJournal, 2021

Forced displacement and resettlement is a pervasive challenge being contemplated across the socia... more Forced displacement and resettlement is a pervasive challenge being contemplated across the social sciences. Scholarly literature, however, often fails to engage complexities of power in understanding socio-environmental interactions in resettlement processes. Addressing Zimbabwe's Tokwe-Mukosi flood disaster resettlement, we explore hegemonic uses of state power during the pre-and post-flood induced resettlement processes. We examine how state power exercised through local government, financial, and security institutions impacts community vulnerabilities during forced resettlement processes, while furthering capitalist agendas, drawing insights from analysing narratives between 2010 and 2021. Concerns abound that multiple ministries, the police, and the army undermined displaced people's resilience, including through inadequate compensation, with state institutions neglecting displaced communities during encampment by inadequately meeting physical security, health, educational, and livestock production needs. We explore how forcibly resettling encamped households to a disputed location is not only an ongoing perceived injustice regionally but also a continuing reference point in resettlement discussions countrywide, reflecting concerns that land use and economic reconfigurations in resettlement can undermine subsistence livelihoods while privileging certain values and interests over others. Policy lessons highlight the need for reviewing disaster management legislation, developing compensation guidelines and reviewing encampment practices. Analytically, lessons point to how state power may be studied in relation to perspectives on the destruction of flood survivors' connections to place, people and livelihoods, underscoring the critical need for theorising the relationships between power dynamics and diverse experiences around displacement.

Energy Research & Social Science, 2021

While controversial plans for fossil fuel pipeline-building continue across Indigenous lands with... more While controversial plans for fossil fuel pipeline-building continue across Indigenous lands without consent, how are visual practicesincluding watching and witnessingserving as modes of resistance? Drawing on a participant-observation ethnography over the 2018-2021 period with environmental defenders on Coast Salish land, in what is colonially called 'British Columbia, Canada', this article offers a lens for exploring visual realms of resistance amid expanding extractivism, police surveillance and reconfigured pipeline opposition during the COVID-19 pandemic. Grassroots photography in land-based monitoring, artistic communication in and around courtrooms and other visual practices have been serving as powerful inflection points, countering multiple facets of petro-colonialismecological destruction, health threats, and moral and legal transgressions by companies and state institutions. They have also been stimulating new collective actions, some led by Indigenous land protectors extending longstanding traditions of protecting human and non-human life. As 'more-than-representational', visual encounters can be active players in constructing knowledge, challenging structures of dispossession, genocide and ecocide, and cultivating understandings of care, sovereignty, climate justice and anti-colonial solidarity from heterogeneous vantage points. Some environmental defenders' visual creativities invite deep reflection on ontologies rooted in reciprocity and respect that are thoroughly ignored in extractivist settler-colonial cultures. The article situates visual strategies in fraught political contexts of ramped-up police and corporate surveillance targeting Indigenous land protectors and other environmental defenders, underscoring critical concern about superficial optical allyship and hollow gestures by state actors responding to racism and state violence on Indigenous land. It calls for attention to dialectical relationships amongst state visual tactics and counter-hegemonic visual practices in struggles to resist colonial energy regimes and to cultivate efforts towards alternative, less destructive energy futures.

Political Geography, 2021

As plans for expanding fossil fuel infrastructure continue to ramp up despite threats to the plan... more As plans for expanding fossil fuel infrastructure continue to ramp up despite threats to the planet, how are geographers to address the criminalisation and prosecution of peaceful acts of defending earth, water and land? Reflecting on a courtroom ethnography and debates spanning legal geography, political ecology and social movements studies, this article explores embodied struggles around oil, ‘justice’ and geographies of caring – discussing how Indigenous youth, grandmothers in their eighties and others were convicted of ‘criminal contempt’ for being on a road near an oil pipeline expansion project. The project (“Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion”) was created to transport unprecedented levels of heavy oil (bitumen) across hundreds of kilometres of Indigenous peoples' territory that was never ceded to settler-colonial authorities in Canada. Focusing on a controversial injunction designed to protect oil industry expansion, the discussion explores the performativity of a judge's exercise of power, including in denying the necessity to act defence, side-lining Indigenous jurisdiction, and escalating prison sentences. Courtroom ethnography offers a unique vantage point for witnessing power at work and vast resources used by state actors to suppress issues fundamental to the United Nations Declaration on Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the Paris Climate Accord. It also provides a lens into the intersectional solidarity and ethics of care among those who dare to challenge colonialism and hyper-extractivism, inviting engagement with multiple meanings of ‘irreparable harm’ at various scales. The article calls for more attention to power relations, values and affects shaping courtroom dynamics in an age in which fossil fuel interests, climate crisis and settler-colonial control over courts are entwined in evermore-complex violent entanglements.

International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2020

Visual practices of representing fossil fuel projects are entangled in diverse values and relatio... more Visual practices of representing fossil fuel projects are entangled in diverse values and relations that often go underexplored. In Canada, visual media campaigns to aggressively push forward the fossil fuel industry not only relegate to obscurity indigenous values but mask evidence on health impacts as well as the aspirations of those most affected, including indigenous communities whose food sovereignty and stewardship relationship to the land continues to be affronted by oil pipeline expansion. The Tsleil-Waututh Nation, based at the terminal of the Trans Mountain Pipeline in Canada, has been at the forefront of struggles against the pipeline expansion. Contributing to geographical, environmental studies, and public health research grappling with the performativity of images, this article explores stories conveying health, environmental, and intergenerational justice concerns on indigenous territory. Adapting photovoice techniques, elders and youth illustrated how the environment has changed over time; impacts on sovereignty-both food sovereignty and more broadly; concepts of health, well-being and deep cultural connection with water; and visions for future relationships. We explore the importance of an intergenerational lens of connectedness to nature and sustainability, discussing visual storytelling not just as visual counter-narrative (to neocolonial extractivism) but also as an invitation into fundamentally different ways of seeing and interacting.

Journal of Public Health Policy, 2019

Energy projects may profoundly impact Indigenous peoples. We consider effects of Canada's propose... more Energy projects may profoundly impact Indigenous peoples. We consider effects of Canada's proposed Trans Mountain oil pipeline expansion on the health and food sovereignty of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation (TWN) through contamination and impeded access to uncontaminated traditional foods. Federal monitoring and TWN documentation show elevated shellfish biotoxin levels in TWN's traditional territory near the terminus where crude oil is piped. Although TWN restoration work has reopened some shellfish-harvesting sites, pipeline expansion stands to increase health risk directly through rising bioaccumulating chemical toxins as well as through increased hazardous biotoxins. Climate change from increased fossil fuel use, expected via pipeline expansion, also threatens to increase algae blooms through higher temperature and nutrient loading. As the environmental impact assessment process failed to effectively consider these local health concerns in addition to larger impacts of climate change, new assessment is needed attending to linked issues of equity, sustainability and Indigenous food sovereignty.

Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2019

Practices of visually representing places of resource extraction and land degradation can be deep... more Practices of visually representing places of resource extraction and land degradation can be deeply contentious, embedded in a wide variety of values, ethics, goals, and relations. Photographs are pervasively used to generate narratives about environmental change, particular social groups, and places. Yet, the sociocultural processes and power relations at play in producing “visual knowledge” and interpreting images often remain underexplored, with limited attention to how photographs and visual storytelling are engaged to (re)orient discussions about change. Challenging ways of seeing, this article discusses relational practices around photography and the narrating, experiencing, and circulating of images. It explores experiences with photovoice—a methodology aimed at realigning the dynamics of who decides what photos matter, how, why, and with what implications, sometimes pitched as a way to “decolonize” research. The study examines interactions in a village in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia, where women shared visual stories to express challenges they face in relation to deforestation and other landscape changes, depleted gold deposits, limited livelihood options, and other themes, conveying place histories and ideas about home, identity, governance, and community. Reflecting on intergenerational dialogues and anxieties about the future, the analysis considers photovoice processes in refracting everyday struggles, arguing for feminist epistemologies that carefully attend to the situated ethics and contingent performative powers of visual storytelling where multiple forms of resource extraction powerfully shape community life. The article calls for greater focus on women’s place-based storytelling and its communicative power, highlighting the significance of positionality when studying socioecological visualization, affect, and change. Key Words: feminist visualization, Indonesia, participatory visual methods, photovoice, resource extraction.

Global Environmental Politics, 2019

In the wake of the Paris Agreement on climate change, promises to phase out coal-fired power have... more In the wake of the Paris Agreement on climate change, promises to phase out coal-fired power have suggested cause for optimism around energy transition globally. However, coal remains entangled with contentious development agendas in many parts of the world, while fossil fuel industries continue to flourish. This article discusses these entan- glements through a climate justice lens that engages the cultural politics surrounding coal and energy transition. We highlight how recent struggles around phasing out coal have stimulated renewed critical debates around colonialism, empire, and capitalism more broadly, recognizing climate change as an intersectional issue encompassing racial, gender, and economic justice. With social movements locked in struggles to resist the development or expansion of coal mines, power plants, and associated infrastructure, we unpack tensions that emerge as transnational alliances connect disparate communi- ties across the world. Our conclusion signals the need for greater critical engagement with how intersecting inequalities are coded into the cultural politics of coal, and how this shapes efforts to pursue a just transition.

GeoJournal, 2018

Various critiques of transboundary natural resource governance in southern Africa have questioned... more Various critiques of transboundary natural resource governance in southern Africa have questioned the efficacy and social equity dimensions of prevailing strategies for protecting transnational ecosystems, highlighting the importance of sociological research on the potentially 'other-ing' impacts of mainstream conservation policy discourse. We draw on research in the Chimanimani Trans-Frontier Conservation Area (TFCA) on both sides of the Zim-babwe–Mozambique border, scrutinizing simplifications inherent in terms such as ''illegal foreigners'' that obfuscate histories and contemporary realities of cross-border social ties. Engaging perspectives of park authorities and chiefs as well as people who have taken up artisanal mining, we explore two related themes—how 'belonging' is negotiated as well as how conservation agendas are instrumentalized by state and non-state actors. Bringing attention to gaps between policy discourses surrounding TFCAs and territorialized practices of exclusion, the article concludes by calling for greater attention to the mutating significance of colonially established boundaries as well as the dynamic influences of social networks in borderland spaces.

A B S T R A C T Academics across disciplines are increasingly employing political ecology lenses ... more A B S T R A C T Academics across disciplines are increasingly employing political ecology lenses to unpack conflicts related to resource extraction. Yet, an area that remains under-researched and under-theorised is how environmental impact assessments (EIAs) are embedded in politics and imagined as sites of power relations. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in Zimbabwe engaging small-scale gold miners, EIA consultants and government officials, this article examines the changing social significance of EIAs during and after a nationwide police operation that was framed by authorities as targeting non-compliance with environmental policy, illegal mining and illicit trading. Among other articulations of dissent, small-scale miners associations protested that EIA enforcement rhetoric served unjustly as a rationale for halting livelihoods and extracting rent from miners in times of economic difficulty. The article challenges EIA narratives that focus narrowly on risk management or governance failure, exploring technocratic obfuscations and how enforcement rhetoric was perceived in relation to criminalisation and coercion, expert environmental consultancy cultures and adapted legacies of colonial practice in contemporary dynamics of rule. Heavy-handed policing under the banner of enforcing order impinged on livelihoods and had counterproductive effects in addressing environmental problems, while complying with expensive EIA report-producing requirements was far beyond the means of most small-scale miners. The article rethinks how technical EIA rhetoric becomes entangled in spaces of contentious politics, the perils of looking only at particular scales of relations to the exclusion of others, and what it means to re-engage Donald Moore's notion of " shifting alignments and contingent constellations of power. " Suggesting future directions in political ecology theorising in relation to extractive sectors, it calls for careful attention to the situated politics of EIAs – situated in time and space, amid varying relations of power – and how multiple hegemonic practices are con-ceptualised and challenged.

Ecological Economics

A B S T R A C T This article uses an ecological economics approach to analyse tensions surroundin... more A B S T R A C T This article uses an ecological economics approach to analyse tensions surrounding efforts to phase out mercury in Indonesia's artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) sector, among the largest sources of mercury pollution worldwide. Many scholars and environmental activists have long hoped that global restrictions in mercury trade would drive up mercury prices and decrease mercury use and pollution in ASGM. However, in Indonesia, despite global mercury trade restrictions, recent increases in domestic mercury supplies through new cinnabar mining developments have made mercury less expensive and more available, destabilizing efforts at reducing mercury use. This article discusses implications of domestic cinnabar mining for controlling mercury in Indonesia's ASGM sector, highlighting obstacles to implementing the Minamata Convention, a treaty that aims to restrict mercury use. We link discussion of mercury mining to other socioeconomic processes, labour relations and power dynamics shaping mercury use in gold mining and hindering collectivised mercury-free technology uptake. Examining new evidence regarding the social metabolism of a changing extractive economy, we underscore why an integrated ecological economics paradigm – carefully grounding analysis in the context of local labour situations – is needed to challenge assumptions and inform new strategies for mercury reduction/elim-ination in ASGM.

Geoforum, 2017

A B S T R A C T This article examines the social and material politics of coal, focusing on mobil... more A B S T R A C T This article examines the social and material politics of coal, focusing on mobilizations against opencast mining in the United Kingdom and Indonesia. Contested spaces and practices elicited by coal extraction provide important openings through which to understand how 'hydrocarbon modernity' is experienced and entangled with different processes of neoliberal capitalism. We investigate resistance against coal at Ffos-y-Fran in South Wales and the IndoMet project in the Indonesian province of Central Kalimantan, exploring how assemblages of protest have challenged the material effects, discursive practices and regimes of accumulation attendant within the coal industry. In both countries, campaigns seeking to 'end coal' have built dynamic geographical alliances, and as collective challenges to mining activities have unfolded, we consider how movements targeting specific sites of extraction have sought to disrupt the industry's 'dis-embedding' of coal from the landscape. Drawing on accounts of how hydrocarbon politics shape societies, the approach we present draws attention to changing linkages between economic, environmental and social advocacy while illuminating the varied ways in which coal mining can compound and perpetuate inequality.

Academics in high-income countries are increasingly launching development studies programmes thro... more Academics in high-income countries are increasingly launching development studies programmes through online distance learning to engage practitioner-students in low-income countries. Are such initiatives providing opportunities to critically tackle social injustice, or merely ‘mirroring’ relations of global inequality and re-entrenching imperial practices? Building on recent scholarship addressing efforts to ‘decolonise development studies’ and the complex power dynamics they encounter, we reflect on this question by analysing experiences of faculty and students in a United Kingdom-based online development studies programme, focusing particularly on perspectives of development practitioner-students working from Africa. We discuss barriers to social inclusivity – including the politics of language – that shaped participation dynamics in the programme as well as debates regarding critical development course content, rethinking possibilities for bridging counter-hegemonic development scholarship with practice-oriented approaches in a range of social contexts. Our analysis unpacks key tensions in addressing intertwined institutional and pedagogic dilemmas for an agenda towards decolonising online development studies, positioning decolonisation as a necessarily unsettling and contested process that calls for greater self-reflexivity.

There has recently been much debate about the ways in which place-based research should contextua... more There has recently been much debate about the ways in which place-based research should contextualize rural land use disputes in relation to economic globalization. This article analyzes how changing hybrid configurations of global and regional influences in Cambodia's extractive sector have transformed the dilemmas of rural place-making, focussing on two cases – a Chinese mining company's concession in Kratie and an Australian mining company's concession in Ratanakiri. Addressing contexts where resource access has been contested by local Khmer small-scale gold mining communities, migrant miners and foreign-owned companies, the case studies illustrate how globalization pressures have been experienced differently. The cases also highlight analytic weaknesses of dominant development narratives that focus narrowly on local illegal land use and the need for resettlement of communities living and working in large companies' concessions. The article introduces a framework of three inter-related themes that encourage a more sensitive interpretation of extractive sector contestations under globalization, calling for critically engaging divergent interpretations of “illegality” in resource use, exploring the dynamic interactions between global and regional actors, and carefully considering small-scale miners' socioeconomic and historical connections to rural places. As this is the first study in almost a decade to focus on social dimensions of Cambodia's mining industry, the article concludes by suggesting how place-based research attuned to ever-changing faces of globalization can deepen understandings of socioeconomic marginalization and transformation in Cambodia's mineral-rich areas and beyond.