Mining Conversations is a monthly online discussion series dedicated to how knowledge practices on local and planetary scales shape the energy landscapes we see today, whether influenced by past or present extraction practices. Each session connects different perspectives to better understand the social, material, technological, and environmental forces at play. The series seeks to provide the needed space for cross-practice, international and reflective conversations about mining among artists, academics, activists, and other persons interested in mining. The series is hosted by the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology and the Anthropocene Commons network.

The series discerns the flows of matter, energies, and ecologies to unearth the roots of resource extraction and the ways in which it continues, more than ever, to shape today’s economic, societal, and environmental landscapes. In 2008, Val Plumwood articulated shadow places as ‘all those places that produce or are affected by the commodities you consume, places consumers don’t know about, don’t want to know about, and in a commodity regime don’t ever need to know about or take responsibility for.’ These commodity regimes are often layered on top of existing social, economic, legal and environmental inequalities. In addressing the ongoing, unequal transitions of energy regimes, we want to think from and through these ‘shadow places’ of extraction.

Depending on the practices of the invited speakers, each session will be organised around a materiality, tracing different flows in which these ‘resources’ travel, at various temporal and spatial scales, from the geological deep time to the uncertain futures, from the micro to the macro level, and from the local to the planetary as part of global supply and production chains.

Mining is a techno-socio-ecological assemblage that requires transdisciplinary modes of reflection and critical analysis. The series wants to lay some ground for this by connecting researchers across sites and inviting them to think through alternative, speculative energy imaginaries and sol(id)arities, through place-based and ‘radical’ (as in Latin ‘rooted’) insurgent practices.

By bringing together the voices of historical, ethnographic, (geo-)scientific, and artistic researchers, activists and practitioners, we intend to weave together conversations across fields, reflecting and developing transdisciplinary methods of approaching and addressing questions such as the following:

How do the histories of mining industries shape the past, present and future of their human and non-human inhabitants?
How do we deal with the ubiquitous and persistent horizons of toxicity that extractivism brings about?
How can we collectively develop decolonial strategies for research and education across minescapes, in a time of global upscaling of extraction in the name of a ‘green’ transition?

The series will thus encourage reflection on mines and mining as metaphors for underground, hidden, deep, layered histories, as well as looking to the future and critically understand how green extraction fits on top of the existing histories, modes of extraction, lifeways and temporalities.

Each session will take 90 minutes and will begin with short prompts by the invited speakers, introduced by a chair. This sequence will be followed by a joint discussion involving everyone present. During the sessions, participants will be encouraged to digitally map traces of their experiences. The aim is to foster a safe and reflective space within the series where we can experiment with ideas and flourish a shared language and terminology for talking and thinking about mining and its various consequences.

We are committed to collectively coming up with a plan for continuing the conversation beyond 2025, such as nurturing the formation of a growing and open constellation of researchers connecting across minescapes and fields of practice, and other follow-up actions. In shaping new approaches to human interaction with the planetary flows, Mining Conversations thereby explores approaches to geoanthropology as an emergent research field of the Anthropocene.

The sessions will be around the past, contemporary and future situations of mining, including sessions on Copper, Lignite, Lithium, Wood, Copper, Petroleum, the Nuclear, as well as ‘Green Energies’ such as through Sun and Wind. Potential future focus topics beyond 2025 can include Gas, Groundwater, Iron, Coal, Gold, Silver, Nickel, or Cobalt etc.