My research focus in on the environmental memories embedded in abandoned mining sites in eastern Nigeria and how they continue to structure everyday life long after extraction formally ended. My research specifically looks at the Enugu coal pits, its hydrological systems, ritual boundaries, and placenames. I argue that they operate as enduring sites of knowledge production, registering histories of labor, dispossession, and environmental risk that exceed what colonial and postcolonial archives record. These landscapes function not as inert ruins but as living archives through which collective memory, Indigenous knowledge, and social life are continuously negotiated.
This project treats Indigenous mapping, oral testimony, ritual marking, and everyday navigation as epistemic systems that encode historical experience and environmental awareness. By foregrounding placemaking practices, including how communities name, avoid, ritualize, and repurpose post-mining spaces, the project challenges technocratic narratives that cast abandoned mines as empty wastelands awaiting closure or remediation.
Methodologically, the research combines colonial and postcolonial archival sources with collaborative community mapping, oral history, and participatory GIS. These methods generate a relational archive in which textual records are read alongside spatial memory, embodied knowledge, and environmental traces. During the MPIWG fellowship, the project will synthesize archival research with field-based mapping workshops to analyze how collective life is organized around extractive afterlives and ecological uncertainty.
Situated within the Department on Knowledge Systems and Collective Life, the project advances an environmental history of extraction that recognizes landscapes as epistemic actors and communities as active producers of historical knowledge.