Paper by Sharon Adhiambo Otieno
Mining worlds: resilience, resistance amidst environmental uncertainties in Western Kenya
Abstract
In Western Kenya, artisanal gold mining remains a vital source of livelihood to miners and communities. Yet it is replete with environmental uncertainties caused by chemical pollution and mine accidents. These conditions generate ecological anxieties that are narrated and contested across multiple domains. The state, NGOs and media often frame mining within the context of illegality, ecological fragility and exploitation. Such narratives portray miners as both vulnerable and ignorant while silencing their voices. Drawing on an ethnographic study in Bondo, this paper centres miners’ narratives as critical modalities through which environmental uncertainties are interpreted, contested and re-imagined. Miners imagine these conditions as both necessary and harmful, particularly in relation to mercury. This harm seeps in soils, water and air while remaining imperceptible. At the same time, mine accidents are narrated not only as structural failures but also as interactions between bodies, spirits and shafts. These accounts resist dominant portrayals of environments as inert, articulating relational ontology where matter and humans co-shape worlds of extraction. The paper situates these narratives within Anthropocene discourse, highlighting how miners mediate ecological anxieties and assert their agency through alternative framings of environmental uncertainties, contributing to broader discussions of resilience, resistance and world-making amid ecological crisis.
Panel: Uncertain Futures Panel (Resilience and Resistance in West & East Africa).
Sharon will also be chairing panel 3 (Uncertain Futures Panel 3: Ecolinguistics and Environmental Precarity).
Paper by: Kevin Oware, Geoffrey Muga, Erick Nyambedha, Ruth Prince
Agrochemical intensification and smallholder precarity: changing agrarian relations in Kenya’s sugarcane economies
Abstract
This presentation explores shifting modes of land ownership and use among smallholder farmers in western Kenya, driven by lucrative sugarcane economies. For many smallholders, rising agrochemical needs alongside unpredictable climate is undermining the variability of their farms. Unable to sustain costs, they lease their land to a growing class of middle-income investors, ‘outsiders’, who become linked to landowners through local brokers. Leasing the land through short-term contracts, these investors seek to maximize extraction of value through heavy application of agrochemicals. Sugarcane production dominates these arrangements, offering farmers immediate financial returns while raising concerns about long-term land alienation and declining soil quality. Embedded in unstable configurations of precarity and dependency, the expansion of leasing is reshaping agrarian relations in the sugarcane zone, intensifying socio-economic differentiation and reconfiguring control over land use.
Panel: Health, Environment, Economy: Narratives, Practices, Futures