Extractive industries loom large over the economies of Canada and South Africa dominating their respective political economies; shaping political imaginaries, social understandings and relations with nature and resource governance. In both countries communities have reacted to this dominance by resisting the land and water use, and modes of resource governance, that are geared towards the facilitation of extractive industries and continuation of the dominance of extractive political economies. Women, youth and people of colour have been at the forefront of this resistance in what can be interpreted as a global, decolonial, socio-ecological struggle over the social and environmental benefits and burdens of mining, the meanings and use of nature such as land and water, and the state’s interrelations with communities and nature in its focus on the facilitation of extraction. The Futures of Care Project uses the cases of Canada and South Africa to centre Indigenous and black/African women and youth’s experiences in mining regimes and their social reproductive labours (day-to-day caring and provisioning and intergenerational transmission of community relations) that both sustain their communities through mining development and struggle for a pathway beyond it. Our primary objective is to amplify and analyze existing alternative relations to land, water and development in mining-affected regions in northern Canada and the Waterberg region of South Africa, and to bring these in conversation with global concerns for just ecological transitions. On the South African side, this research is guided by The Society, Work and Politics Institute (University of Witwatersrand), and their established research and activist networks in the coal mining communities of Lephalale, Limpopo province, whilst the Canadian leg is managed by the Queen’s University team focusing on Indigenous communities in mining affected northern Canada.
