In this seminar I intend to take you on a journey into the belly of a coal mine where alternative imaginations and subaltern voices create the underground as a gendered space. The underground—for decades the invisible ‘other’ of landscape and terrain in geography—has emerged as the source of ‘stuff’, or material objects, resources and commodities not deemed intrinsically valuable until extracted using human labour. By bringing women’s voices to the forefront, I draw attention to the politics of imagining space, and argue that the attention to ‘the material’ in modernity has ignored how nature and gendered humans co-constitute the space that is imagined as the source of resources.

Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt is a Professor at the Australian National University, Crawford School of Public Policy, ANU College of Asia and the Pacific. She researches the social aspects of resources, in particular, both large, industrial, and informal, artisanal and small-scale resource extraction, water management, and feminization of agriculture in rural communities, in South Asian countries but also in Indonesia, Lao PDR, Papua New Guinea and Mongolia. Currently, Kuntala is researching how global coal sector transition can be gender-just. 

The Annual Master of Development Practice Lecture 2021 is hosted by the School of Social Science, University of Queensland