10/02/21: GOSSIP seminar- Emilka Skrzypek
GOSSIP is excited to welcome Dr. Emilka Skrzypek back to our school at 3pm on 10th February as a guest presenter at our first session of the new term. Dr. Skrzypek will be giving a short talk about her research at Frieda and her recently published book titled ‘Revealing the Invisible Mine.’
Located in a remote area of Papua New Guinea, Frieda River is one of the largest undeveloped copper and gold deposits in the world. It is also what we could call a ‘stranded asset’ – despite over 50 years of exploration by a string of mining companies, Frieda River is not a mine but remains a resource extraction project at advanced stages of development. At the next GOSSIP session Dr Emilka Skrzypek will talk about her research at Frieda and her new book titled ‘Revealing the Invisible Mine: social complexities of an undeveloped mining project’. The book explains how five decades of encounters with exploration companies shaped local communities’ aspirations, made them revisit and re-examine their past, and develop new strategies to move towards a better, more prosperous future. You can read the introduction to the book here.
Emilka is a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology. She was among the first cohort of students to graduate from St Andrews’ Sustainable Development programme in June 2008, before completing an MRes and a PhD in Social Anthropology; and held a Marie Sklodowska Curie Global Fellowship co-hosted by St Andrews and University of Queensland’s Centre for Social Responsibility in Mining. In between her academic projects she has worked for Global Witness and the Scottish Government’s Strategic Research and Analysis team, and conducted contracted research in industry settings.