A dying village: Mining and the experiential condition of displacement

Abstract

The concept of displacement remains relatively underexplored in relation to mining. Whilst there is a growing body of work that theorises displacement as a condition, a lived experience of spatial and temporal dissonance and rupture, scholarship on Mining-Induced Displacement and Resettlement (MIDR) remains set in a conventional approach to the phenomenon and continues to approach migration and displacement as two interlinked process. In this article, I aim to illustrate how mining-induced displacement can occur without movement, yet how it is tied to mobility—of humans or non-humans—over time. I argue that analytical investigation of both place and time are central to understanding mining-induced displacement. Place, here, is defined as a bio-physical, social and ontological phenomenon that is experienced in time with temporal references to past/s and future/s. Transformation in either of these three domains will often be paralleled with political contest and temporal inequalities, subsequently leading to experiences of loss and disempowerment. Through a case study from the Mid-Western Region of New South Wales in Australia, I seek to illustrate how displacement can occur in place through parallel experiences of involuntary immobility and what I call ‘broken time’.