Technopolitics of fear: managing emotions about infrastructural collapse at a mining business conference

Abstract

Despite the regular occurrence of disasters such as infrastructural collapse and massive pollution, the mining industry has failed to introduce substantive innovations in waste management. In this paper, we explore a key factor behind such reluctance, which we have called a technopolitics of fear. Based on a science and technology studies framework, such technopolitics will be understood as a complex assemblage of affects, practices, and technologies with its governing logic and producing multiple effects. To explore the contours of such technopolitics we analyze a business conference of the mining industry occurring in Chile in 2019. Emerging first as an emotional outpour, the uncertainty caused by recent mining waste disasters was turned into something much more productive; first as “sound” economic valuations and then as conventional techno-fixes. In the conclusions, we will speculate about alternative ways in which the mining industry could truly enact the radical transformations needed to keep practicing extraction in vulnerable worlds.

Keywords

• Tailings dams
• infrastructural collapse
• management
• emotions
• fear
• Barragens de rejeitos