According to indigenous leader Ailton Krenak, “For thousands of years, in different cultures, we were led to imagine that humans could act with impunity on the planet, and we reduced this organism to a sphere made up of elements that constitute what we call nature - this abstraction. We have constructed justifications for acting on the world as if it were plastic: we can make it square, flat, we can stretch it, pull it (...). The Western way of life has formatted the world as a commodity and replicates this in such a naturalised way that a child who grows up within this logic lives it as if it were a total experience”. (Life is not useful, 2020).

The commodity world is based on the idea of infinite economic growth and is marked by the intense exploitation of minerals. However, overriding different ways of life has affected and continues to affect diverse territories and communities around the globe, whose ways of life are seriously threatened in the name of supposed social progress. Returning to Krenak, “I don't know of any mountain that will produce cement and stone again once they have been extracted from its body. If we devour mountains and swallow up the Earth's subsoil to build cities, what we are doing, as Drummond would say, is animating the machination of the world.” (Ancestral Future, 2022).

This workshop critically addresses the impasses and violations in the context of extractivism based on the sharing of experiences between Brazil and Portugal. The workshop is organised into two sessions. The morning will be dedicated to discussing ongoing research, and in the afternoon, there will be a roundtable discussion about life experiences and mobilisations between Brazil and Portugal. Based on the specificities and commonalities found in the territories, our aim is to bring together disciplines and perspectives to debate and build alliances around issues such as mining, human rights, socio-environmental disasters and the climate emergency.

The workshop will be conducted in Portuguese and English. We will be able to offer translation assistance in Portuguese, English, and Spanish on-site to those who need it.

Programme
10:00 - 12:00: Mining: From prospecting to disasters
Moderator: Gustavo García-López

Viliina Kaikkonen: Climate policies and the exploration of critical minerals in Portugal

Miguel Artur de Ávila Carranza: The periodisation of environmental licensing stages in the face of the impacts of immigration on small towns receiving mining projects in Brazil

Ananda Martins Carvalho: Mining and Socio-environmental Disasters in Minas Gerais (Brazil)

12:30 - 14:30: Collective Lunch - Mining Conversations

14:30 - 16:30: Experiences and mobilisations around mining

Moderator: Lúcia Fernandes

Ana Paula Lemes de Souza
Gabriela Margarido
Luzia Queiroz
Mariana Riquito
Tiago Calado
 

Organising Committee:
Ananda Martins Carvalho, Lúcia Fernandes, Miguel Artur de Ávila Carranza and Viliina Kaikkonen, under the Ecology and Society Lab (ECOSOC) activities.

Bio notes

Ana Paula Lemes de Souza | PhD student in Law at the National Faculty of Law, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She is a researcher, author, essayist, and lawyer. She has a sandwich doctorate scholarship from the CAPES - PrInt Institutional Internationalisation Programme and is conducting a doctoral internship at the Centre for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra. Activist and leader in the defence of mineral waters and parks.

Ananda Martins Carvalho | PhD student in Discourses: Culture, History and Society at the Centre for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra (CES/UC) and member of the CES Ecology and Society Lab (ECOSOC).  Carvalho is researching the effects and impacts of the disasters caused by the collapse of mining tailings dams in Mariana and Brumadinho (Minas Gerais, Brazil). She has a master's degree from the postgraduate programme in Architecture and Urbanism at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) and a degree in Psychology, with an emphasis on Psychosocial Processes, from the same university.

Gabriela Margarido | Law graduate (from the Lusíada University of Lisbon) with a postgraduate qualification in Environmental Law (from the Institute of Legal and Political Sciences of the Faculty of Law of the University of Lisbon). I work as a generalist lawyer in individual practice. Since 2017, I have been part of the citizens' movement that was spontaneously and immediately formed to contest the open-pit mining project that intends to set up in Argemela (Barco and Coutada, in the municipality of Covilhã, and Silvares and Lavacolhos, in the municipality of Fundão), side-by-side with the surrounding inhabitants. In 2021, this citizen's movement was formalised with the formation of the GPSA-Grupo pela Preservação da Serra da Argemela association, which I have represented ever since.

Lúcia Fernandes | Researcher at the Centre for Social Studies and member of the Ecology and Society Lab (ECOSOC, CES). She seeks to connect with living beings, territories and struggles, where networks of care and co-production of shared knowledge play a central role. Fernandes tries to think about the articulation of research with outreach and teaching activities and has been working in the transdisciplinary area that relates the environment, health and citizen mobilisation, with methodologies and pedagogies geared towards the process of meeting and co-producing knowledge with different stakeholders.

Luzia Queiroz | Studied Tourism at the Federal Technological Education Centre of Minas Gerais (CEFET-MG) and is one of those affected by the Fundão dam collapse in Mariana (Minas Gerais, Brazil). She is a representative of the residents of the Paracatu de Baixo community on the Commission of People Affected by the Fundão Dam (CABF).

Mariana Riquito | PhD student at the University of Amsterdam and Junior Researcher at CES-UC, writes and researches on the contested “energy transition”, exploring debates on extractivism, ecofeminism, ontological pluralism, and systemic alternatives.

Miguel Artur de Ávila Carranza | Architect and Urban Planner in a doctoral internship at CES, graduated from the University of Brasilia, international mobility at the University of Buenos Aires, specialising in Urban Planning at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Master in Architecture and Urbanism at the Fluminense Federal University and PhD student at the School of Architecture and Urbanism at the University of São Paulo. He has professional experience and internships in government bodies in Brasilia/Brazil (Federal Public Prosecutor's Office and Chamber of Deputies), as well as serving as Municipal Secretary for Urban Development, Works, and Public Services in Serra do Salitre-MG. He has also worked as a consultant architect at Fiocruz/Brazil on technical assistance, land regularisation and urbanisation projects and has taught at three private universities in Minas Gerais and Goiás in Brazil.

Tiago Calado | Graduated in Anthropology in 2020/07/08 from the University of Coimbra, Department of Life Sciences. He attended the Master's in Ecology and is currently doing the Master's in Anthropology, Globalisation and Climate Change, both at the University of Coimbra. Areas of interest include Ecology, relations between human and non-human actors, Anthropology of the Future, Urbanism, Mining, and Social Imaginaries.

Viliina Kaikkonen | Doctoral researcher in Global Development Studies at the University of Helsinki, in a doctoral internship at CES. She has a degree in Sustainable Development from the University of St Andrews and an MA in Social Anthropology from the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO) Argentina. Her doctoral research focuses on energy transition policies and mining prospecting, with a specific analysis of the case of lithium in Portugal, focusing on the anticipations, speculations and imaginary futures involved in this process.