Dr Lorenzo D’Angelo is co-organising this workshop with Dr Jorge Calvimontes, University of Campinas in Brazil and Dr Cristiano Lanzano, Nordic Africa Institute in Sweden. With Professor Eleanor Fisher, Gold Matters’ project lead, Dr Lorenzo D’Angelo, senior researcher at the University of Reading will be presenting a paper entitled: “Gold, Fish, and Banana. Cosmologies of (un)sustainability in Southwestern Uganda”.
In this paper, Lorenzo D’Angelo and Eleanor Fisher discuss how people living in the Southwestern Uganda combine various economic activities such as cultivating cash crops (e.g. plantain bananas and coffee) and searching for alluvial gold. They argue that gold mining contributes to make farming sustainable in a context in which the local land tenure system is fragmented and soil fertility reduced, with the younger generations unable to find alternative sources of income within the locality.
GOLD MATTERS is a transdisciplinary and transcontinental project building collaboration between academics, artists and mining actors which aims to understand whether and how societal transformation towards sustainable mining future can take place in artisanal and small-scale mining. Apart from the University of Reading, it involves several other academic partners such as the University of Amsterdam (The Netherlands), Leiden University (The Netherlands), Hamburg University (Germany), Campinas State University (Brazil), Mbarara University (Uganda), and The Nordic African Institute (Sweden).
GOLD MATTERS is financed by the Belmont Forum and NORFACE Joint Research Programme on Transformations to Sustainability, which is co-funded by DLR/BMBF, ESRC, FAPESP, ISC, NWO, VR, and the European Commission through Horizon 2020.
For more info about “Gold Matters” see: http://gold-matters.org/