Technologies of mining production: space, discourse, new materialities, and media

My dissertation examines how technologies are developed to either sustain or resist the process of mining production in the Chilean Andes. Through the study of the mining company Los Pelambres, I make visible knowledge, skills, and practices that take place in a zone of socio-environmental conflict. In the dissertation, I demonstrate how the mining activity exceeds the zone of extractive operations of a company, studying different sites, specifically the local communities of the Choapa Valley, the zone of extraction inside mine Los Pelambres, the museums operated or funded by the company, and local and national media outlets. I approach these sites as mediums, where knowledge and meaning-making processes transform materialities and discourses. I study the political, extractive, and popular technologies of mining, and demonstrate how even some seemingly anti-technological practices of resistance contain technical dimensions. To articulate the nuances and richness of the technological process of mineral extraction, I use multi-sited ethnography, critical ethnography, performance, and critical discourse analysis as complementary methodologies and theories, and I use them for their politics and application in archival research and fieldwork. Through these methodologies, I work toward re-drawing boundaries of mining production and the visualization of the fluidity of the mining system in itself

Mining the Media: How Community Radio Breaks Through Extractivist Discourse Articulations in a Context of Disaster and Socio-environmental Conflicts

Mining extractive companies have extended their operations to other realms, such as the management of media. Thus, from a space of physical intervention, they start to conquer a space of symbolic representation, creating a gap between local communities' perceptions of the mining process and the perception that is spread through media outlets about the operations in the territories. In Chile, this perception is complicated by the participation of the mining industry in media ownership and the overall concentration of media. Through critical ethnographic fieldwork, analysis of national and local community media examples, this article explores an ongoing socio-environmental conflict in the Choapa Valley where the copper mine Los Pelambres operates. It does it by first discussing how the mining industry pursues narratives of extractivism in the Chilean media and then discussing how local communities defy this narrative by creating their description of the territory through local media outlets.Research Center for Integrated Disaster Risk Management (CIGIDEN) ANID/FONDAP/15110017 Vicerrectoria de Investigacion y Desarrollo, Universidad de Chile UI-002/1