Actors’ Perspectives on Gold Mining and Local Community Development Nexus: a critical discourse analysis of representations of actions

The starting point of this thesis is that because mining interferes with the environment and social practices which depend on the environment such as farming, different social actors like affected local farmers and civil society organisations (CSOs) can make different meanings out of mining affect human well-being based on the same or different accounts of actions in materially situated environments. This is because meaning is not a given but is socially produced through the deployment of mediational means such as language and discourses in place such as farming at materially situated places where mining takes place. Because making a link between mining and human well-being is a social practice there is the possibility of a struggle to legitimise a particular way of construal, which may serve a particular interest or another. However, there is an inadequate empirical analysis of how social actors’ accounts of actions occurring at materially situated places mediate how social actors actually construe how mining affects human well-being at materially situated places. This thesis aims to create a new understanding of existing social science research on the social issue of how mining affects human well-being in materially situated environments. In this thesis, the mining and development nexus refers to the meanings and interpretations social actors assign to the relationship between corporate mining activities and the human well-being of individuals in the host local communities. In order to analyse how different social actors actually construe the mining and local CD nexus, the study focuses on the analysis of how social actors’ accounts of actions occurring or which occurred in materially situated places are used as mediational tools to construe how mining affects human well-being at materially situated places. Fairclough notion of discourse as social practice constitutes the main theoretical perspective of the study. Fairclough’s (2003, 2010) CDA theory is complemented by Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) theory and nexus analysis methodological theoretical perspective.