Women in mining frontiers in Africa: Exploring the diverse ways in which women’s lived experiences and livelihoods around sites of extraction are affected by mines.

Scholarship on mining frontiers tends to be masculine in focus, covering topic such as the centrality of resource extraction in the colonial and post-colonial projects. Most recently, debates have been on diminishing mineral deposits and emerging forms of worker control, the environment etc. Very little has been on women’s experiences. Recently, in popular culture and within social movements the work of women is slowly being documented. However, rigorous academic scholarship remains masculine with limited theorisation of the intersection between gender (women specifically) and extractivism. In other words, there is no serious effort at bringing these together to tell a ‘coherent’ narrative about women and mining frontiers in Africa. This project then is a small attempt to respond to those absences, erasures and silences that mark this scholarship. Through this research project I contribute towards the development of this bourgeoning scholarship on women in mining frontiers in Africa. I do this in two ways: by looking at the historiography of women in mining and current lived experiences and struggles of women around these sites of extraction. I do that by mapping out the diverse ways in which women’s lived experience and livelihoods around sites of extraction are affected by mines.