Governing Extraction: Analysing environmental regulation and mining futures in Goa

Wednesday, 30 April 2025 | 10 am

SEMINAR

Governing Extraction: Analysing environmental regulation and mining futures in Goa

Abha Lal
PhD candidate, Department of Anthropology, Rice University, Texas, USA

Tarini Monga
PhD candidate, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle, Germany

Wednesday, 30 April 2025 | 10 am
Xavier Centre of Historical Research, Porvorim, Goa

Please join us for a Seminar on ‘Governing Extraction: Analysing environmental regulation and mining futures in Goa’ by Abha Lal and Tarini Monga on Wednesday, 30 April 2025 at 10 am at the Xavier Centre of Historical Research, Porvorim, Goa. The Seminar will conclude by 12 noon. REGISTRATION REQUIRED

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PLEASE NOTE

• This is an academic seminar.

• Registration is mandatory to attend the Seminar.

• Participants will be required to read and engage with a paper precirculated before the Seminar.

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Governing Extraction
Analysing environmental regulation and mining futures in Goa

This research seminar will examine extractive politics and contestations around mining as a lens to theorise environmental futures in Goa. Through ethnographic examinations of resource extractions — specifically, iron ore and sand — we interrogate tensions between legal battles, state control and modes of local resistance. The governance of these mining industries pose critical questions around regulatory frameworks and the future of resource management in Goa. Reflecting on historical narratives of how mining bans and governance regimes came to be, in this seminar we will ask questions such as: What role do legal or bureaucratic ambiguities play in shaping extractive economies? How do regulatory regimes become legible or illegible to various actors involved in extraction? What do different ways of knowing material and local ecologies reveal about the competing claims to resource governance?

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Abha Lal

Abha Lal is a PhD candidate at the Department of Anthropology at Rice University, Texas, USA. Her work explores the relationship between law, extractive industries and environmental governance, using the case of iron ore mining in Goa, India, as a focal point of the ethnographic examination. Abha previously worked as a journalist in Kathmandu, Nepal, and has a BA in Sociology and Anthropology from Swarthmore College.

Tarini Monga

Tarini Monga is a social anthropologist pursuing her PhD at Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle (Saale) in Germany where she works as part of the Emmy Noether Research group, ‘S.AND - the Future of Coastal Cities in the Indian Ocean’. Her doctoral thesis is an ethnographic project, tracing the movements of silt, sand and sediment on Goa’s waterfronts to examine economies of resource extraction. Her work with the S.AND team aims to address broader questions around resource valuation regimes and the future of coastal commons in port cities. Tarini also holds a MSc in Social Anthropology from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) where her thesis examined timber circulation in Himachal Pradesh, through the lens analysis of joint forestry efforts and timber use in state policy.

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Xavier Centre of Historical Research
B B Borkar Road, Porvorim, Goa 403521, India
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