Janet Adomako Coffee Talk
Title: Complex Ontologies & Gendered Health Vulnerabilities in Ghana’s Small-scale Gold Mining Industry
Synopsis: In the last two decades, following the 2008 financial crisis, “small-scale” mineral extraction witnessed an unprecedented expansion of capitalist investment. In Ghana, millions of local and foreign miners, particularly Chinese miners, became involved in gold mining. Despite women’s ubiquitous roles, mining spaces and gender roles have remained intact. Men and women occupy specific spaces of extraction, impacting mining activities, livelihoods, and health vulnerabilities differently. My research has focused on differences in mining spaces, gender roles, and health vulnerabilities as they are shaped by notions of gender and ontological understandings of biophysical entities and human reproductive materials. I draw from feminists and political ecologists’ methodologies and theoretical tools to call attention to why ontologies matter in gendered extractive practices. I argue that gender relations of power alone do not fully explain the complex socio-ecological relations mediating access to, use of, and control over mineral resources. Efforts to understand the complexities of gendered resource practices must attend to complicated understandings of bodies and objects of extraction.