Call for Book Chapters: "From Legacies of Extraction to Environmental Health Governance: Collaborative Research and Responses to the Impacts of Mining among Indigenous Communities"

Vernon Press invites chapter proposals for the volume entitled "From Legacies of Extraction to Environmental Health Governance: Collaborative Research and Responses to the Impacts of Mining among Indigenous Communities," edited by Thomas A. De Pree, Valoree Gagnon and Jessica Worl.

There is an established tradition within environmental anthropology and beyond that offers rich ethnographic descriptions of the legacies of extraction and exploitation of mineral and energy resources around the earth. From local to global scales of analysis, research interest in extraction has become dense and entangled in diverse transdisciplinary fields ranging from political ecology, to science and technology studies, to Native American and Indigenous studies.
Although these growing fields of study examine multiple scales of political, economic, environmental, sociocultural, and technoscientific analysis, their empirical stories tend to focus on the legacies of social and environmental impacts among local mining communities who live downwind, downstream, and downgradient of the pollution and contamination from mine waste, and other industrial by-products of extraction. In their portrayal of the environmental health disparities brought about by extractive ideologies and practices, they have produced alarming evidence of the disproportionate impacts among Indigenous communities around the world. In a parallel interdisciplinary field, environmental health scientists are beginning to calculate the disparate impacts of abandoned mine lands (AMLs) among rural Indigenous communities, and publish epidemiological and toxicological research on a range of environmental risks and exposures, and biological health effects from living near AMLs. Together, these diverse fields paint a picture of the dialectical relationship between mining companies and Indigenous peoples, who often recognize each other to be among the greatest threats to their existence. In many ways, these stories of extraction and exploitation are engaged in the responses, resistance, and resilience of local Indigenous communities in the wake of acute and chronic disasters brought about by industrial mining, forged by the expansion of capitalism and settler colonialism.
This is a call for contributions that traverse transdisciplinary pathways of collaborative engagement from legacies of extraction to environmental health governance. We are interested in chapters that document and analyze, not only legacies of extraction and exploitation, and Indigenous-led resistance to mining, but also the emergence of new possibilities for collaboration in the environmental health governance of past, present, and speculative sites of mineral resource extraction. Practices and partnerships with, for example, environmental health scientists, Native and non-Native community partners, NGOs, policy-makers, and/or regulatory agencies are of particular interest. In what ways are collaborative research engaging (inclusively and equitably) to attenuate environmental health risks and exposures from toxic compound mixtures on communities living near abandoned, active, and prospective mines? How can such collaborative research serve as the basis for restoring healthy ecological relationships that afford many different possible pathways for Indigenous resilience, continuity, and survivance?

● Justice and sovereignty intersections: Environment, climate, energy, food, agriculture, and restorative
● Decolonizing, anticolonial, and/or Indigenous methodologies
● Indigenous sciences, Indigenous knowledge systems (IK), traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), and/or the role of Indigenous languages
● Indigenous data sovereignty and research autonomy
● Indigenous revitalization and resiliency

● Settler-colonial determinants of health
● Toxic policies and/or infrastructures of mineral and energy resource extraction
● Social science collaboration in environmental health sciences

Scholars interested in contributing should email a 300-word abstract to Thomas A. De Pree (TADepree@salud.unm.edu) by February 28th, 2023.