We are excited to let you know that People and Mining was recently successful in a grant application to the International Institute for Cultural Enquiry. Our bid included partners from the Department of Politics at University of Exeter, Camborne School of Mines, Pact, the Indonesian Institute for Sustainable Mining and Ore Deposits Hub. We are excited to work together over the coming year, but most importantly the grant will enable us to do work that is important for consolidating the initial digitisation and launch of our network earlier in 2021, helping us to work more collaboratively with all our network members.
Working with IICE makes a lot of sense for us because they are committed to bringing academics and practitioners together to tackle pressing global issues. IICE is broad in its approach to ‘cultural enquiry’, noting ‘the behaviors, beliefs, values, symbols and material effects of human animals’. Society faces the problem of how the materials needed to decarbonise can be sourced responsibly and mining is interwoven with human, political, cultural and environmental challenges across a range of scales. A key agenda for People and Mining is to harness and direct the synergy that emerges at the meeting point of so many diverse methodological and empirical specialisms in order to innovate genuinely cutting edge, and disruptive sites of research.
The IICE funding will run for a year and will fund ongoing development of our website and its functionality, work on communications to grow and increase the visibility of the network and ongoing facilitation of our regular seminars. In summer 2022 we will regroup to focus strategically on impact and innovation because we share a commitment to turning the conversations and relationships developing through our regular meetings into impactful research projects and publications. We stated in our application that we believe our potential to produce challenge led, interdisciplinary work that is more than a simple ‘add-on’ of social science to STEM projects (or vice versa) is premised on dialogue, relationship and trust building.
We are excited to work together over the next year with all of our members, and thankful for the support of IICE.
Find out more about the International Institute for Cultural Enquiry (IICE) at: https://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/iice/