Event Description
From the early industrial mining period until 2002, women were prohibited from performing underground work in South African mines, except in Asbestos mines. It was only in 2004 that mines started employing women in full-time underground occupations. Drawing from her ethnographic research, where she worked with mineworkers underground for a year, Asanda-Jonas Benya will focus on the making of women’s subjectivities in micro-mining spaces such as the cage, change house and underground. Popular culture and mining literature tend to treat “the mine” as a monolithic and neutral space. This invisibilises and mutes significant micro-spaces and gendering processes that occur in them. This seminar demonstrate sthat there is no monolithic 'mine space' but multiple and contested gendered and gendering spaces. It also hope to illustrate how mining spaces, their rhythms and logics, are a constitutive factor in the making of gendered subjectivities.
Event Speaker
Asanda-Jonas Benya, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Cape Town
Event Information
Open to Columbia University ID holders. For more information, please visit the event webpage.
Hosted by the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University.
