Open Access

Reed Hannah Araxie Rachel

• This dissertation investigates how the extractivist model has affected the empowerment of women engaged in artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) in post-Havana Colombia, focusing on five mining regions in the department of Antioquia. While much research on Latin American extractivism centres on environmental impacts or organised resistance, this study places the voices of women miners at the centre of analysis. Women miners traditionally play an indispensable role in gold mining, either as alluvial artisanal miners in the ancient form of the barequeo or as scrap workers, known as chatarreras. These women operate in a paradoxical space: as both participants in and disproportionately affected by neoliberal extractive economies, their labour is essential yet criminalised, while their presence is visible yet institutionally and academically ignored. Framed by a revised feminist empowerment (RFE) framework developed through Latin American feminist theory, this research draws on feminist phenomenology, positionality, andThis dissertation investigates how the extractivist model has affected the empowerment of women engaged in artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) in post-Havana Colombia, focusing on five mining regions in the department of Antioquia. While much research on Latin American extractivism centres on environmental impacts or organised resistance, this study places the voices of women miners at the centre of analysis. Women miners traditionally play an indispensable role in gold mining, either as alluvial artisanal miners in the ancient form of the barequeo or as scrap workers, known as chatarreras. These women operate in a paradoxical space: as both participants in and disproportionately affected by neoliberal extractive economies, their labour is essential yet criminalised, while their presence is visible yet institutionally and academically ignored. Framed by a revised feminist empowerment (RFE) framework developed through Latin American feminist theory, this research draws on feminist phenomenology, positionality, and qualitative fieldwork, including semi-structured group interviews in the regions of Andes, Buriticá, Zaragoza, Toledo, and Segovia, carried out between April 2022 and February 2024. It demonstrates that empowerment is not a static outcome, but a circular, relational, and negotiated process shaped by patriarchal power relations, critical consciousness, intersectionality, and multiple forms of violence, including economic, territorial, and sexual violence. ASGM, while a source of subsistence and cultural identity, also exposes the miner women, the Mineras, to mercury pollution, precarious labour, and systemic invisibilisation. Formalisation efforts and extractivist policies place the Mineras in a state of invisibility and exclusion rather than providing solutions. Yet, through collective organising, sisterhood, ancestral practices, and community-based alternatives, these women envision and actively create post-extractivist feminist visions grounded in dignity and community care. This dissertation contributes to feminist theory, critical development studies, and extractivist scholarship by making visible the lived realities and empowerment strategies of women miners in one of Colombia’s most gold-rich and conflict-affected territories.…