UCLA

This dissertation explores how the uncontrollability of the social and material basis of life enters into mining negotiations, and how communities challenge extractive projects. I argue that the Niafarang Project, a proposed heavy mineral sands mine in the Casamance region of Senegal, has been alternately presented as knowable and governable, or unknowable and ungovernable, resulting in what Michel Callon and others have termed “overflow”—the excesses produced through attempts to bound and separate economic, ecological, or political objects, and how these excesses push back. In this case, overflows create the need to constantly engage in negotiation about the terms and conditions of extractive development and its alternatives.

Based on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, I examine various strategies used in the mining negotiations, focusing in particular on how overflows become a source of action in environmental impact assessment, environmental knowledges, the role of popular participation, enactments of “dialogue” with the state, and the mining company’s securing of a “social license to operate.” In conversation with anthropological and geographical literatures on mining, this dissertation contributes an on-the-ground and processual examination of how mining negotiations proceed, through bureaucratically- and legally-sanctioned means, as well as through cultural, geographical, and extra-legal strategies. Theoretically, it contributes to studies of knowledge production, activism, and ambiguity, and their roles and complications in how extractive development is governed in the Global South.