Counter-mapping in the Sperrins

V’cenza Cirefice is a visual artist and activist engaging with ecofeminist and environmental justice issues. Cirefice’s research and activism has covered issues from divestment from fossil fuels, reproductive justice, period poverty, food sovereignty, refugee solidarity, to feminist geopolitics and feminist political ecology.

Dalradian Gold are seeking planning permission for a huge gold mine and processing plant near Greencastle in the Sperrin Mountains. The communities resisting this project report that they have faced criminalisation, intimidation and oppression, mirroring legacies of conflict and colonialism. 

For her PhD research at the University of Galway, Cirefice wrote about ‘Resistance to extractivism in the Sperrin Mountains through a feminist environmental justice lens’ (2019 – 2023). This project uses an artist, activist, participatory methodology to explore resistance to extractivism by making visible the worldviews, experiences and practices of those engaged in anti-mining activism in the Sperrin Mountains, County Tyrone. 

In doing so this project aims to highlight voices from frontline communities that are facing environmental injustice, foregrounding their resistance and agency and countering narratives of passive victims in rural peripheral areas exploited by neoliberal extraction. 

Further, it aimed  to foreground situated and local communities’ knowledges, practices and counter-narratives to extractivism and to advance scholarship and policy by contributing to a gap in the understanding of how extractive processes and resistance play out in Global North contexts, especially in the North of Ireland with its unique socio-environmental setting.

Using a methodology of activist engagement, photovoice and counter-mapping, this project explores the ways in which people relate to each other and the more-than-human world. These ways of being and seeing the world are often relational and deeply rooted in place, with the land and with each other. They represent ways of being that exist despite extractivism.

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Keywords: Extractivism, ecofeminism, art, counter-mapping, coloniality,

community, environmental justice, resistance, power.

Links to wellbeing economy: Extractivism, environmental justice,

neoliberal extraction, community, social movements.