Hannah Elizabeth Tubman

HANNAH TUBMAN, then a graduate student at University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland, was awarded funding in October 2022 to aid research on “A ‘New’ Frontier: Mining Afterlives and Futures in Kabwe, Zambia,” supervised by Dr. Naomi Haynes. Following the 1994 closure of the Broken Hill Mine in Kabwe, Zambia, the area transformed from a resource frontier to a waste frontier, characterized by abandoned infrastructure and a mineral tailings heap. Today, reprocessing operations are underway to reclaim mineral waste, turning the area into a waste-based commodity frontier. The material vestiges of the mine are one future making strategy as envisioned by some residents. Another vision for the future involves the remediation of lead poisoning from mining. In South Africa, a class-action lawsuit was filed on behalf of Kabwe residents against Anglo American, a former owner of the mine, to address the lead poisoning. The lawsuit is presented as a remediation effort, one of many to reduce lead poisoning in Kabwe. Although litigation is increasingly used to redress environmental harm, this research argues the law is limited in its ability to make slow violence legally intelligible. Based on participant observation, interviews, focus groups, document and video analysis, and archival research, this project explores the different, and often conflicting, strategies of frontier and future making via extraction. With mining communities, like Kabwe, at the center of these developments, it is important to understand community concerns about livelihoods, toxicity, and futurity.