Between Hope and Loss: Peruvian Women Activists’ Visual Contestations of Extractive-led Development
Year: 2023
Type: article
Abstract: This paper critically explores how women anti-mining activists conceptualize development, in the context of living with and resisting large-scale resource extraction in Cajamarca, Peru. I contend that participatory photography provides an opportunity to contest hegemonic development narratives and the notions of ‘lack’, ‘poverty’ and ‘progress’ that are bound up with such narratives, enabling participants to simultaneously evoke both hoped-for alternative futures and nostalgic renditions of a threatened present. Moving beyond an explicit and immediate focus on the socially and environmentally destructive nature of large-scale mining, I explore how the women instead document productive Andean livelihoods and everyday ways of life, capturing the ways in which hoped-for futures are enacted in the present. The women activists articulate their resistance through photography, identifying and celebrating practices of hope in their everyday lives and communities and providing an emotive counter-narrative to extractive-led neoliberal development discourses. The paper reveals that participatory photography approaches generate critical insight into the emotion-suffused ways in which development is understood by grassroots activists in contexts of extractivism.
Source: Progress in Development Studies
Author: Katy Jenkins
Institution: Northumbria University
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Gender equality
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,250
OpenAlex ID: W4388931326