Borderline Justice: Between Extraction and Conservation in Cockpit Country, Jamaica

The project aims to provide a novel perspective on the convergence of extraction-conservation-justice geographies, by drawing on feminist, posthumanist, decolonial, and border lenses.

By using border as method, the project departs from the idea that extraction and conservation spaces cannot be seen as separate from each other, least not when they are located side-by-side and are constantly conditioned by one another.

Protected areas are often drawn up to allow mining outside their boundaries, and these situations tend to generate massive resistance movements.

The project seeks to advance our understanding of these processes, through a case study of Cockpit Country, Jamaica, where the struggle to ‘Save Cockpit Country’ from bauxite mining is ongoing.

Cockpit Country is approached as a borderscape of extraction-conservation, and attention is given to the attempts at binding up the place into a space for conservation vis-à-vis extraction.

The study looks particularly at the clash between top-down geopolitics and the ‘alter-geopolitics’ emerging ‘from below,’ on-ground and on-line, and the role of bordering in shaping space, time, subjectivities, imaginaries, and relationships.

This involves asking questions about how justice claims are framed and scaled, and the role of intersectionality in creating (in)justices in Cockpit Country, with, for and beyond humans. Visualisation elements are engaged to further this view together with actors on ground.