Negotiated access: Alluvial gold mining, territory, and mobility in the Peruvian Amazon

Abstract

How, why, under what conditions, and with what effects do people move across space in relation to mining? How can a focus on spatial mobility contribute new insights into the relations between mineral extraction and social change? Participants in this roundtable session, many of whom contributed to the recently published edited collection Mining, Mobility, and Social Change in the Global South (Routledge, 2024), will address these questions through discussions of and comparisons between case studies in Melanesia and the Andean region. Cases to be discussed in the session involve both large- and small-scale mining as well as Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations. Participants’ discussions of these cases will address issue such as the historical-geographical factors shaping mining-related mobilities in the two regions, the meanings people attach to their movements, and the relations between people’s mobility practic es and the flows of other things put in motion by mining, such as capital, ideas, technologies, and toxic contamination. The session’s overall aim will be to develop fresh ideas on how comparative studies on Latin America and Oceania can advance understandings of the social geographies and spatial politics of mining.