Jessica Mary Smith

Since our first issue in 2009, questions of gender, race, and power have been central to this journal. In 2024, Managing Editor Kacey Beddoes provided an insightful summary of this substantial body...

This article investigates how a proposed energy rate hike in the southern Colorado city of Pueblo opened up contestations over how energy justice ought to be defined and enacted. Regional leaders framed much of the public debate through affordability. Our analysis of public comments and our ethnographic data make clear that the rate hike was never just about affordability, but larger questions of procedural justice, environmental justice, and visions of desirable and just energy and economic futures. Ultimately, we find, residents critiqued the narrow framing of affordability and constructed their own definition by drawing from a powerful set of collective memories and identifications. These include the region’s longstanding history of unionized steelmaking and coal mining, its Indigenous and Mexican-American roots, and the layered history of social movements that infuse the city’s physical and social landscape. Comparing our different sources of data – public comments, interviews, fieldwork, and oral histories – shows the value of mixed-method research to understand how people work both within and against formal public processes in energy debates.

Background: With climate change becoming a critical issue, scientists and policymakers are developing solutions to address the risks it poses. One such solution is Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), which reduces the amount of CO₂ that enters the atmosphere by capturing it and storing it underground. Literature review: Previous research on CCS has focused on the technical interpretation of risk through quantitative risk analyses. Social science research has focused on public acceptance of CCS, and to what extent knowledge about risks plays a role. However, a comparison of risk perceptions from both CCS developers and local community members during a CCS study, and why these perceptions are different is absent. Research questions: This article attempts to fill this gap by asking: 1. How do perceptions of potential CCS risks vary between interested local community members and CCS technical professionals, and how do these perceptions influence the messaging and receiving of risk communication? 2. What personal, institutional, and other factors, such as past experiences with heavy industry, influence how people view CCS and its risks? Methodology: Through 30 interviews and participant observation, this study examines the varied perspectives on the risks of CCS among local community members and CCS professionals analyzed using thematic coding and a quantitative analysis of codes. Results and discussion: Findings suggest that there are clear differences in how local community members and CCS professionals think about the risks of CCS, such as CCS professionals addressing risks to the project rather than risks of the project that community members reference most frequently. Implications: By identifying institutional reasons why these gaps in risk perceptions appear, this article provides insights into what risk communication practices are being used and how they impact project communication.

Industrial decarbonization refers to the removal or reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, process emissions, or embodied carbon from industry. Building from our experiences working with communities contemplating industrial decarbonization projects, we argue that community-based research can move nebulous calls for “community engagement” to processes that emphasize just and equitable governance. We first summarize the co-benefits and risks of industrial decarbonization for historically marginalized communities. We then draw from our own experiences working on community benefit plans for developer-led projects to show how community-based research can help ensure that industrial decarbonization projects benefit the communities that choose to host them.

Social science research about extraction often conflates mining and ore processing activities or disregards processing altogether. This article highlights the value of studying mineral processing as a distinct domain. Our article centers on processing plants used for artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM), where miners employ their “empirical” knowledge about processing through bodily interactions with their ore to transform it into a commodity of universally recognized value: gold. In our ethnographic account of the processing practices in two ASGM towns in rural Colombia, external efforts to “improve” mineworkers’ ore-to-gold practices threatened the autonomy they otherwise experienced in their artisanal forms of organizing their labor. We trace the insights, critiques, and responses that emerged from the miners’ positions within gold processing assemblages of knowledge, material affordances, technology, and sociopolitical organizations. Analyzing these miners’ experiences provides novel perspectives for scholarship of workers’ desires to preserve autonomy amid looming threats of deskilling.

In the municipality of Andes, agriculture rules the steep surface of la tierra , while informal miners pick and blast subterranean tunnels to make a living from gold. While a few residents perceived a dichotomy between farming and mining, our ethnographic research revealed that livelihood blending was far more common as people adapted to environmental changes brought by climate change. People inhabit and make a living out of the relations between coffee farms and mines, blurring common sense divisions between the two livelihoods. We argue that the verticality of this tropical region facilitates the co-existence of mining and farming, even as climate change drives transformations in the sociotechnical labor practices, environmental perceptions, and livelihood decision making that animate coexistence. Our research emphasizes that mining, too, can be generative of life worlds that encompass agriculture—a perspective that is missed in the blunt application of extractivism as an analytic tool.