Room 02: Arts of Co-Labouring

Wall: Uganda 

Instructions

In Uganda, we have worked (co-laboured) with miners and others in a transdisciplinary way to gain nuanced, well-informed perspectives on issues of transformation and sustainability in gold mining. Undertaking transdisciplinary research has meant sharing our different perspectives and expertise, learning and training together. Researchers have not sought to use their non-local expertise during fieldwork to ‘help’ anyone, in development terms, believing that knowledge and researchers’ skills as knowledge-makers are most important. Instead, Environmental Women in Action in Development (EWAD), the NGO within our project, supports local miners with sustainability action. Our co-labouring holds power dynamics, both due to differences between our backgrounds, and due to our ‘encounters’ with the political economy of mining. Research in mining communities exposes obvious inequalities of wealth, of course, but beyond this, local extractive politics mean we have conducted research under the eyes of government minders, and we are aware of the danger of miners being harassed by officials within their daily working lives.

Next Wall:
Arts of Co-Labouring
West Africa