Hidden tunnels, drowned dragons, and other subterranean secrets: Environmental politics of small-scale mining in Colombia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article, I seek to make meaning of small-scale mining landscapes that are not only the object, but also the subject of politics. More specifically, I explore how in Colombia, the physical world of informalized small-scale miners (their technology, topography, and geology) mediates their relationship with the state bureaucracy. While drawing from ethnographic literature on “clandestine” and “natural” infrastructures, I maintain that tunnels, excavators, dredges, mountains, and forests are politically charged matter that enable miners not only to extract minerals, but also to keep such prohibited work hidden from state agents—or at least, to keep those agents at bay. Thus, unlike conventional analyses of small-scale mining, I invoke miners’ relationship with their work environment, not as one more argument of why they should or should not be included in political formations, but instead to contend that they already participate in politics, albeit often outside the formal channels of liberal democracy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".