While mining can be a site for literal extraction, can it also be deployed epistemologically to excavate the "murder of knowledges"?
The UP Department of Geography and the Philippine Geographical Society present the third Heo/Geo Lecture Series for 2024. The lecture will be delivered by Jake Atienza who draws from his research on mining in Cebu, and builds discursive paths towards responding to the foregoing question. Entitled Written Out of the Narrative: Knowledge Production as Mining Violence in the Cebuano Bureaucracy, the talk happens on Friday, 8 March 2024 at 5:30PM, via Zoom.
Throughout Jake Atienza's research on mining in Cebu, several residents asked for their identity to remain anonymous. Those who don’t, put themselves at risk in one of the deadliest countries for land defenders worldwide. With the expansion and encroachment of mining tenements, residents raise concerns about the destruction of land they consider their “generational inheritance”. For decades, Cebuanos have struggled to be heard and seek justice in the face of mining violence. When a group of locals filed a lawsuit against mining corporations and the Government following the deadly 2018 landslide in Naga City, it fell on deaf ears. This lawsuit is indicative of experiences of violence beyond material consequence, including intimidation and the loss of intergenerational connections to place. More than a series of separate mining-related incidents, Atienza's research aims to demonstrate how an epistemological framing helps to center the rule of law as a site of mining violence.
As state and community produced archives and narratives, legal documents and letters complicate the persistence of an extractive logic deriving from the archipelago’s colonial history under Spanish and American rule. Drawing on primary materials collected during ethnographic research spanning 2019 to 2023, Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ epistemicide helps problematize cognitive injustice as a central feature of a colonial struggle that renders epistemological complexity impossible. Pivoting from a geographic orientation of mining to an epistemological one centers the deadly business of mining as the “murder of knowledges”. In Atienza's analysis, these texts privilege an epistemology that renders mountains and coastlines, once places of life and intergenerational stories, into sites of extraction. In this context, knowledge production stemming from interactions with state and corporate actors is deemed epistemic violence since it rests on the exclusion and eradication of Bisayan epistemologies.
In his interdisciplinary practice, Jake Atienza (who was born in Cebu and lives and works in San Francisco, USA) seeks to make visible the intricacies of power and extractivism. With a Dutch mother and a Filipino father, Atienza witnessed the politics behind the destruction of Bantayan Island in Cebu - his paternal home. This grounds his work spanning community-based projects on Bantayan island to interviews with small-scale miners in the Kingdom of Tonga, artists and farmers in Australia, and his on-going work focusing on extractivism. His key areas of research are mining, epistemology, violence, law and society, and the intersection of power and knowledge production. He has contributed articles and radio features to SBS Radio, Art Monthly Australasia, Kantor Berita Radio, and NTU Centre for Contemporary Art’s ‘Climates. Habitats. Environments.’ and has exhibited at Firstdraft and 55 Sydenham Road in Australia. Atienza was a visiting scholar/artist at ‘Atenisi Institute (Nuku’alofa, Kingdom of Tonga, 2018;2019), Tropical Futures Institute (Cebu, Philippines, 2019), and the East-West Center (Honolulu, Hawai’i, 2020). In the spring of 2023, he completed his M.A. in Sociology at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa where he was the recipient of the Center for Philippine Studies’ Corky Trinidad Endowment Scholarship at the UH-Mānoa in support of his research on an epistemology of extraction. Presently, he is a Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of Geography at the University of the Philippines-Diliman.
The Heo/Geo lecture is part of the ongoing 40th anniversary celebration of the UP Department of Geography (1983-2023) which simultaneously serves and provides a space where practical, discursive and embodied discussions and performativities from academic geographers, practitioners and civil society can come together and thrive. This talk is co-sponsored by the Human Geography (HuG) and Geographies of Disasters and Hazards research clusters of the UP Department of Geography.
To attend the talk, please click this link to register, or paste the following link to your browser: https://tinyurl.com/4z6tfumn
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