Gudhlanga, Juliet

Research Interests:

Sociology of Africa and Development Sociology

Geographical Area:

Zimbabwe

Current Project:

Reframing Feminist Environmental Identities, Gold narratives and Transformations in Africa from coloniality to neoliberalism

In understanding how African women in their diversity have shaped their environment or have been shaped by their environment, gold mining is an indispensable element. For centuries, portrayal of gold mining has been mystified in capitalisms flourishing romanticism. Climate change is a situated yet complex global phenomenon shaped by patriarchal, racial, capitalist systems and characterised by environmental transformations, spoilage, struggle, resistance and resilience. Since the discovery of gold in 1886 Witwatersrand, gold mining played a crucial role in shaping the environment and defining colonial administrative borders in Southern Africa. Environmental devastations and acute poverty expose entrenched intra racial inequalities and environmental struggles. Therefore, reflecting need to interrogate evolving conceptual challenges around feminist environmentalism by reimagining anthropogenic activities rooted in gold mining within a history of dispossession and repossession post-independence.
Available narratives on gold mining speak less on the natural environment and interactions amongst the inhabitants. Marginalised voices have not gained much attention. The intersectionality framework is useful in interrogating complex issues such as gender, racial segregation, extractivism, resilience and environmental struggles from a pro marginalised approach. Recent political and social justice debates around the environment and gold exploitation convey gaps on the profound interlinked environmental transformations illustrated by miners, expressed through art, and oral
tradition. Resultantly, data collection methods will be organised along the logic of qualitative approaches, making the most out of existing secondary data and focusing on epistemological issues underpinning the methodological tools. Therefore,
undertaking a constructivism paradigm in interpreting the realities on the ground and understanding how climate change realities are perceived and justified. More specifically the study adopts a feminist participatory approach and methodology
based on robust qualitative data triangulation to; (i) analyse African ecocritical scholarship and creative practice in Climate Justice cultural expressions/practice and empirically investigate dynamics around feminist environmental struggles and
resilience in Africa’s gold-mining communities, (ii)conceptualise feminist mobilisation and evolving environmental perceptions in pluralistic ways (iv) examine environmental historic legacies and lay opportunities for alternative policy frameworks. Narrative analysis coding of recuring themes and cycles of environmental feminism from both primary and secondary data will be utilised to analyse and represent diverse standpoints within the framing of ecofeminism, allowing new areas of research for sustainability and globalisation of local experiences around the multiple interconnected issues within African gold mining localities. Thus, a rigorous approach inclusively identifying, strengthening and globalising local voices around gold mining from a feminist lens harnesses collective memories, interrogating structural roots of
inequality, evolving environmental transformations and the co-existence of dominant grafted capitalism through how artists, creatives and communities are responding in words, movement, arts to Climate Change injustice. The project will be conducted in an ethical manor and, the project acknowledges risks and seeks to mitigate them by utilising the researcher’s positionality and reflexivity, who has a deep knowledge of the localities and a strong in-country network in the selected areas of study