Gold as something to be proud of? Contradictions of ethical consumerism in artisanal and small-scale gold mining in Latin America
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines how artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) is represented in a voluntary responsible sourcing certification programme in Latin America. By critically analysing the language and imagery employed on the programme’s online platforms, we explore how advertising campaigns of ethical consumerism embody gendered and racialised ideologies and commodify development stories. Our analysis shows that the images of development and racialised bodies in this case study illustrate and reproduce two key contradictions of contemporary global development: first, between the extractive and humanitarian ideologies in liberal development, often made strange bedfellows in transnational mining; and, second, between the simultaneous hypervisibility and invisibility of the rural labour that underpins ethical consumerism in mining. We argue that this campaign commodifies ASGM’s development stories, which (re)produces a false and harmful good/bad mining dichotomy where, in the case of artisanal mining, the ‘good ASGM’ is defined and policed by Western consumers and expert-outsiders. We suggest that, by implication, (1) non-certified artisanal miners are portrayed as incapable of effectively managing their own resources, which instead ought to be managed by outsiders, and (2) the existing link between non-certified ASGM and rural development is made invisible.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".