Congratuatlions to Dr Katy Jenkins and Dr Hugo Romero-Toledo (COES, Chile) who have been awarded a British Academy International Partnership and Mobility Grant for £29,886!
Developing a participatory approach to understanding socio-environmental transformations and conflicts in the Atacama Desert, Chile: Gender, indigenous communities and large scale mining.
This project brings together UK and Chilean academics researching diverse aspects of social and environmental conflicts in relation to large scale mining. The project aims to develop innovative participatory methodologies for capturing processes of change within rural and urban communities affected by large scale mining developments in the Atacama Desert region of Northern Chile. The interdisciplinary collaboration will involve a combination of networking activities, workshops, teaching, and new collaborative research. It is structured around two key cross-cutting themes – gender and processes of re-ethnification – and understanding how these in turn intersect with broader social, political, environmental and economic transformations brought by the significant expansion and intensification of mining activities in the region. Research will involve the development of community workshops and pilot projects in three communities in the Atacama Desert, in order to trial the participatory methodologies developed in the course of the project.
The project brings together academics from Northumbria, Durham and Newcastle Universities, with academics from 5 Chilean institutions, and is planned to begin in January 2016.