"In this talk, I’ll present my ongoing research on mining residues in Brazil. I’ll introduce you to Paracatu, a small Brazilian city that has its history deeply entangled with extractive activities. Today, Paracatu hosts the biggest open pit gold mine in the country, but along with gold extraction comes also a massive production of residues — as, for instance, the biggest tailings dam in Brazil, as well as different possible contaminants.

My research concerns the dynamics of visibilizing or invisibilizing different byproducts of mineral extraction, that often occur through politics of categorization enacted by a myriad of actors. In order to do this, I am following some of the wastes that come up in this process to unravel the stories of conflicts and controversies they help to create through their relations. And just like what is called ‘waste’ can be a microscopic contaminant or a gigantic mud lake, the stories they produce can refer to completely different temporal or geospatial scales."

Isabela Noronha is a visiting PhD at CEH and candidate in Environment and Society at Unicamp, Brazil