Artisanal and small-Scale Mining, Formalisation and the Social Structure of Work

Public Seminar by Professor Blair Rutherford

Professor Blair Rutherford has worked as part of a research team carrying out ethnographic and critical legal studies research focusing on gendered dynamics in artisanal and small-scale gold mining in Mozambique, Sierra Leone and Kenya. In this talk, he suggests that examining formalisation initiatives through what he calls the “social infrastructure of work” provides new insights into the gendered, classed and power dynamics at play. He argues that attending to some of the contingent and routinised articulation of social, power and authority relations shaping widespread work practices in varied sites of ASM extraction and processing allows one to understand how technological and environmental changes concatenate with  differing socioeconomic consequences. Any formalisation and/or securitisation interventions will be shaped by these assemblages as well as the practices of these interventions themselves. This event is co-hosted by the GCRO, SWOP, WISER and the Wits Mining Institute.

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