Natural resources are opportunities for economic development, yet often exploited and mismanaged at an industrial scale at the detriment of local economies and their ecologies. My research explores preserving these resources to sustain the environment and meet the imperatives of responsible sourcing and practice.
Practices of extractive obesity have escalated in the quest for accumulation, amplifying the depletion of our natural resources and promoting the exploitation of labor to the detriment of local economies. Extractive obesity describes the indulgent exploitation of resource extraction by transnational mega-corporations that destroy the life support systems (environment and socio-cultural fabrics) that sustain localities. The African continent supplies most of the world's natural resources yet cannot promote the wellbeing of its indigenous people. The complex interplay of economic, political, and capitalistic factors at the national/international level leads to the gutting of localities. Government, civil society, communities, and industry must preserve (non)renewable resources to protect their environment and meet the imperatives of responsible sourcing and practices that underpin the UN's SDGs.
I will use place-based liberatory research methods to develop contextual knowledge towards new epistemologies for distributed natural resource systems that create localized community interventions. Building on the insights from African pedagogy, ecology, business, design, and appropriate local technologies as necessary components, I hypothesize three strategic pathways that designers, entrepreneurs, advocates, and academics can apply: (1) pragmatic solutions that prioritize localities' needs and reduce exploitation in natural resource extraction. (2) Activate opportunities of sustainable models that center "economic" benefits for localities and engage in new ways of connecting the "local" to the "global."(3) Experiment with alternative transition pathways to post-extractivism through speculative experiential futures.
Anthropocentric capitalist views toward the earth's minerals have largely contributed to the destruction of our life support systems, the exploitation of people, and the depletion of our natural resources. Our current idea of modernity (progress) is inextricably linked to the extraction and commodification of mineral resources. The imperialism of the human in relation to minerals (non-human) via extractive capitalism now requires a holocentric shift through the de-imperialization of anthropocentric-like approaches for sustainable mineral resource management.
Anthropocentric capitalist views toward the earth's minerals have largely contributed to the destruction of our life support systems, the exploitation of people, and the depletion of our natural resources. Our current idea of modernity (progress) is inextricably linked to the extraction and commodification of mineral resources. The imperialism of the human in relation to minerals (non-human) via extractive capitalism now requires a holocentric shift through the de-imperialization of anthropocentric-like approaches for sustainable mineral resource management.
In recent years, many anthropogenic-like neo-extractive models have offered new frameworks to solve the paradox of the resource curse, yet many have failed. Resource-rich nations in Africa have been unable to reach ecological resilience, sustainable resource extraction for value creation, and economic diversification of its revenue.
The burgeoning Transition Design field argues for new ecologies of interventions through a transdisciplinary approach to building “sustainable, equitable, and desirable long-term futures.” Building upon the theories of Transition Design, this work conjures up the imaginaries of post-extractivism, degrowth, and post-development to offer alternatives to distributed mineral resource systems.
This research focuses on mineral-oriented ontology and will be situated at the intersection of Transition Design, Economics, Geology, and Pan Africanism. This transdisciplinary fusion will probe unanswered questions in the sites of extraction, leveraging entrepreneurial nodes to cultivate a "geofuturist mindset" that can activate the manifestations of a post-extractivist society at a local and global level. In Transition Design, little work has been done to leverage entrepreneurial nodes to generate new insights for Distributed Mineral Resource Systems (DMRS). My social enterprise "Root Studios" will pioneer this space as an open collaborative co-design practice to experiment with mineral resources and the systems that govern them.
"The primary reality of imperialism in Africa today is economic" because industrial capitalist economies view Africa as a liability for their extractive Obesity.[1] This damaging perspective has created a paradox between ecologically harmful local extractive economies and socially exploitative global supply chains that continues to materialize value for the industrial West while contributing disappointingly little to African local economies.
In the many opportunities of Africa, the comparative advantage is still mineral resources, yet the contemporary extractive capitalism in today's African economies looks like western capital: ravished ecosystems and colored labor that involves “high profit, low wages, and cheap raw materials,” often provoking instability at the niche, regime, and landscape level.[2] Resource nationalism has made strides towards maximizing the value for the benefit of communities but has done little to reallocate these revenues to create a diversified economies.
The genesis of this research is centered around a single resource - diamonds - viewing Kono diamonds as a material narrator with a significant disconnect from the circumstance of its source and usage, which opens up new lines of inquiries on human history, behaviors, and economics.
Natural diamonds were formed billions of years ago deep within the earth's mantle without exposure to human systems. Before their discovery in Kono in the 1930s, the Kono people were an isolated community, relying on "in situ utilization" to survive.[3] They practiced subsistence farming, and the diamonds below them held no socio-cultural value.
This would change forever when Kono diamonds were first discovered in the 1930s, and De Beers developed their infamous "A Diamond is Forever" marketing campaign in 1947. Kono diamonds took on a new socio-cultural significance, symbolizing everlasting love as an integral part of wedding rings. This demand gave diamonds a political significance by creating the conditions for "blood diamonds," a term conceived out of the irony of "a product sold based on love, beauty, and foreverness," causing death and destruction in Africa’s diamond-driven civil wars.[4]
The horrors of the Sierra Leonean diamond industry have occurred because of the reliance of its economic growth on the artisanal mining industry, worth 90% of the $400 million in diamond exports. [5] The paradox in a diamond-rich Sierra Leone is that the economy would collapse without diamond exports. However, the current conditions of neo-extractivism are environmentally unsustainable- causing ecological destruction and exposing communities to health and safety risks from groundwater contamination, water-borne diseases, and drowning. The anthropocentric handling of diamonds has forced our existence's best and worst instincts onto their socio-cultural significance: wars and weddings. Diamonds in the Kono district of Sierra Leone illustrate the ontological tensions about "progress" and development in extraction and consumption sites, and the materiality of these diamonds has been dictated by unbroken temporal ramifications that have transcended into their non-human realm.
This research has two primary avenues of inquiry 1) mineral-oriented ontologies and sustainable mineral resource systems, and, therefore, three research questions.
In what ways can minerals(diamonds) matter to the ecosystem (environment) beyond the human domain (economy)? How have minerals (diamond) influenced the material and non-material culture in a place? (ie. social values and status of ownership)
Given that minerals (diamond) have been around for billions of years, what might we learn from the economic history of (Africa & the World) through its extractive practices?
What are the conditions that can enable mineral resource-heavy economies to transition towards a more diverse and sustainable model(s)? Furthermore, what roles can citizens and the state play in ensuring that natural resource wealth leads to sustainable development? How can extractive industries promote the achievement of the local communities' sustainable development goals?
This research will aim to deliver new epistemologies for mineral resource systems. I hope to arrive at an ontological understanding of minerals in two categories:
1) Value of minerals beyond the human domain. Developing this decolonial perspective will make space for alternative, less destructive ways of mineral resource utilization.
2) Developing a language of scales to understand natural resource economies through the lens of diamonds. If successful, this will open up new lines of inquiry and understanding of the entire system of extractive capitalism and offer new models for building sustainable and diversified economies in resource-rich nations.
This research embodies the academic, my lived experience, my work, and the trauma epistemologies. Finding healthy separations will generate appropriate levels of objectivity and subjectivity towards my research methods and distillation of data. With a Western education, I risk accidentally inheriting colonial anthropological practice habits and will take steps to challenge this tendency. The experiences of the oppressed cannot be told through the oppressor's language, and local participants will have the freedom to choose the mediums to tell their stories.
Academic integrityThis research involves "Category Two exempt research into individual human participants, and therefore all research will be submitted for review by the Institutional Review Board (IRB), and I will complete the appropriate educational program.
Industry HazardsThe natural resource industry, especially the diamond industry, can be a dangerous space, threatening my safety and the participants. Participants' anonymity will be secured through running discrete workshops that generate composite narratives: combining insights gained from individuals into a single narrative. Entering the realm of exposing industry failures can put me at risk in some areas, and I will hire the appropriate security personnel while researching in sacrifice zones.
At the heart of the methods used in this research will be an autoethnographic lens that facilitates the task of an exposer of truths and a connector of ideas. My internal ethics is informed by the complexity between my Kono upbringing - indigeneity and trauma - and my Western education.The application of critical self-reflection will protect the research’s credibility by tackling the risk of accidentally inheriting colonial anthropological practice habits. It will leverage a decolonial lens to follow indigenous cosmology, ontology, axiology, epistemology, logic, ideology, and teleology.[6] The following seven criteria are boundaries to ensure this research is grounded in a Pan-African mindset.[7]
Literature will guide much of this research, focussing on two parts: theoretical and historical understanding.
The theoretical aspect will be driven by robust literature reviews on the work that continues to influence this research. Primarily, it will focus on.
In parallel, the archaeological & visual narrative of resource origins, extraction & exploitation project will evolve to a new research focus on a single mineral (diamond) as the lens through which to view the broader problems within extractive capitalism. The extensive timeline of diamonds' origins and choreographies will open up new ways of scaffolding and afford different ways of reflecting on the insights.
"Diamonds Historical Research Project" will be leveraging archival research to identify the shifting diamond resource epistemologies beginning with the first discovery of diamonds in ancient times. This research project aims to understand what has changed in diamond extractive systems over time and how that change has been incorporated into the present system.
This theoretical and historical research will be furthered through a grounded theory approach to place-based liberatory research methodologies.
Layer OneOn site-specific visits, patchwork ethnographies will deliver fragmentary yet rigorous images of communities through short field trips into the locality. It will develop insights into local people's relationships with minerals, their environment, extractivist industries, aspirations, and recent shifts towards sustainable development and economic diversification. The trips will be to contemporary sites of extraction - Kono diamond mining communities, Democratic Republic of Congo cobalt miners, and Chilean copper miners - and previous sites of extraction that have diversified their economies: Botswana and Norway. The following methods will be deployed to generate these insights.
An open, collaborative, co-design space for research through “making” will leverage all the insights from the patchwork ethnographies through Multi-Stakeholder Partnerships (MSPs) within a Kono-based maker’s space: "Root Studios." Collectively, students and myself will leverage the maker’s space to engage in “research through design” via the physical experimentation of minerals, their usages and alternative means of sustenance in place, according to the needs, aspirations, and relationships outlined in layer one.
Entrepresearch is the primary action-based research method that will be used. Entrepresearch emerges from “Prospective Design” as a combination of academic design with entrepreneurial action to develop alternative presents by delivering solutions with an immediate impact tailored to the local context. While acknowledging that these solutions are nested within wider systems, entrepresearch aims to resolve individual pain points with an immediacy not yet possible in Transition Design. This method of research seeks to create alternative presents.
The Kono communities know the roughness and density of exploitation and the trauma that accompanies that to the most profound extent. Employing Experiential Futures methods can act as a “harbinger” to guide in exploring the appropriate "readiness" in developing "mindset and postures" for reimagining mineral resource systems that are contextually responsive.[9] The following methods can help stakeholders co-create compelling visions of a long-term sustainable mineral resource future according to extrapolations of their interventions created in the maker space.