LMN is delighted to announce the fifth Resisting Mining Book Club 2022 with guest speaker Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt, who will be speaking about her edited collection Between the Plough and the Pick: Informal, Artisanal and Small-scale Mining in the Contemporary World (Canberra: ANU Press, 2018)
About the book:
Between the Plough and the Pick deepens our understanding of informal, artisanal and small-scale mining, popularly known as ASM. It engages with wider scholarly conceptualisations of contemporary global social, agrarian and political changes, whilst underlining the roles that local social‑political-historical contexts play in shaping mineral extractive processes and practices. The book 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.
The contributions to this book bring these people to the forefront of debates on resource politics, exploring the complexities in histories, 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. Between the Plough and the Pick shows how these miners are inextricably engaged with, or bound to, global commodity values, as well as intimately involved in the production of new extractive territories and rural economies.
Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt will give an introductory lecture which will be followed by a Q&A. You do not need to have read the book to attend this meeting. However, if you want to read it, the book is available to buy in the UK, and all registered participants in the Book Club will be sent a PDF version via email.
About the author:
Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt is one of the leading global experts in critical research on the length and breadth of gender and community livelihoods in two areas of natural resources: water and extractive industries. Her research is informed by feminist scholar-activist research methodologies. Kuntala is a Professor in the Resouce, Environment & Development Program, Crawford School of Public Policy, at The Australian University (ANU). Most of her research is on South Asia, but she has led a number of major research projects in Indonesia, Lao PDR and Mongolia. Alongside Between the Plough and the Pick, Lahiri-Dutt has published The Coal Nation: Histories, Ecologies and the Politics of Coal in India (2014), Dancing with the River: People and Life on the Chars of South Asia (2013), and Gendering the Field: Towards Sustainable Livelihoods for Mining Communities (2011).