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Extractive industries and postcolonial masculinities in Asia and the Pacific

Crawford School of Public Policy
Photo by omid roshan on Unsplash

Event details

Workshop

Date & time

Thursday 01 December 2022
9.00am–5.00pm

Venue

Hybrid event TBA

Speaker

Raewyn Connell

Contacts

Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt

This is a hybrid event. Please use the ‘register now’ button to attend in person or join via Zoom here.

As extractive capital expands globally, breaking new grounds in areas of contested masculinities, the need to deconstruct the industry’s hypermasculinity and male hegemony becomes increasingly necessary. New multinational companies bring their employees from countries such as China and India, and in the process reshape indigenous masculinities (Connell 2014, 2016; Lahiri-Dutt 2012). Old and new masculinities find new sites of production and new ways of manifestation, and their juxtaposition heralds novel ways of understanding and studying gender in the extractive industries. At this crossroads, conventional studies (such as by Rolston 2014) of women in mining continue to play important roles, but examining the multinational mining corporations to understand how hegemonic masculinities are continually contested, negotiated and transformed is increasingly assuming significance.

We will host a one-day workshop to focus on the changing masculinities in the postcolonial Asia-Pacific. In this region, the historical relationships between colonisers and colonised have changed, and new interactions and social connections are occurring between locals and foreign employees, including non-Westerners and Westerners. Consequently, it might be necessary to analyse the masculinities of mining operations and mineworkers in ways that depart from the predominately linear and binary paradigms. How can we imagine masculinities that are characterised by hybridity, fluidity and adaptability, and bring to the forefront the experiences and views of local people and foreign workers who share the same space. The postcolonial setting, where navigating masculinities entails much more than simply adopting Western values, products and emulating ways of life, allows individuals of diverse ethnicities and cultures to be able to influence one another in ways that necessitate new modes and techniques of knowing than earlier studies have indicated.

This workshop invites submissions of 250-word abstracts (along with three to four lines about yourself) examining the possible areas of focus such as historical development, class relations, power dynamics, ethnicity, race, the body, place and time in masculinities in the extractive industries. We are also interested in ethnographic observations of how women alter and reconfigure the masculinities of the mining industry and their performances of masculinities. We hope to publish a special issue of a peer-reviewed journal with selected submissions.

Email your abstract by 15 November 2022 to: extractive.industries@gmail.com Organisers: Mr I-Chang Kuo, Ms Gretchen Druliner, and Professor Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt

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