Mapping the truth about mining: Corporate cartography and its contestations

Abstract

Conflicts over extractive projects often hinge on questions about which and whose knowledge counts, and whose realities and knowledges are ignored in decision-making. This has led scholars to scrutinize ‘corporate science’ and the ways in which mining corporations produce forms of ignorance through the deliberate distortion and manipulation of knowledge on the socio-environmental impacts of mining. In this article, I examine these dynamics through a case study of the expansion of mining in the Ecuadorian Amazon, with a focus on the role of corporate cartography and counter-mapping. Based on an analysis of the ‘lines of becoming’ of various maps and ethnographic engagements with map-makers, I argue that our inquiry into corporate science and ignorance should go beyond the notion of ‘ignorance as strategy’. To fully understand the production of ignorance in the extractive industries, we should look more comprehensively at the ways of knowing and unknowing that have become customary in this sector. Drawing on power/knowledge-ignorance and the work of decolonial critical geographers, I show that a focus on the rather mundane and standardized practices and procedures enriches our understanding of the way in which corporate actors – and in particular their consultants – produce and reproduce colonial forms of (un)knowing.