Thesis
Beyond the Mine Site: Social Reproduction and Gender Equality in an Extractives Town
Masters by Research, Murdoch University
2025
Abstract
This thesis explores the gendered impacts of the extractives industry in Karratha, a resource-dependant city in Western Australia’s Pilbara region. Moving beyond economic and community focus of traditional mining literature and the 'women in mining' framework, this study centres the experiences of women navigating work, housing and everyday life in a town shaped by the extractives industry. Drawing on feminist social reproduction theory and critical perspectives on extractivism, it investigates how extractives corporations rely on and reproduce gendered structures of labour, care, and social life within resource dependent towns.
Based on qualitative data from interviews and observations with fourteen women, the research reveals how the extractives industry deploys housing as a material and symbolic structure of control. I find that access to housing is deeply tied to employment status and company hierarchies, reproducing unequal access to stability, autonomy and basic services. In line with social reproduction theory, the research reveals that even as women engage in fulltime paid work, they remain burdened with unpaid care responsibilities, with their labour both inside and outside the home rendered invisible or undervalued. The research also reveals that access to education and healthcare are shaped by access to housing and structural norms of the extractives industry. Even leisure time in Karratha is shaped by the town's gendered norms, with social recreation oriented towards masculine activities. Additionally, a set of powerful themes of sexism, racism and environmental impact emerge as largely unspoken but highly influential forces in the community- issues which are mismanaged or downplayed in public discourse, further marginalising already vulnerable groups.
In Karratha, housing emerges as the central resource through which multinational extractives corporations control the social reproduction of the town. This control reinforces structural inequalities through housing arrangements, gendered trade-offs, unequal access to services and intersecting forms of discrimination, ultimately shaping hierarchies, community identity and power relations.
Details
- Title
- Beyond the Mine Site: Social Reproduction and Gender Equality in an Extractives Town
- Authors/Creators
- Alicia Griffiths
- Contributors
- Rochelle Spencer (Supervisor) - Murdoch University, Indo-Pacific Research CentreCarol Warren (Supervisor) - Murdoch University, School of Humanities, Arts and Social SciencesLian Sinclair (Supervisor) - Murdoch University, Harry Butler Institute
- Awarding Institution
- Murdoch University; Masters by Research
- Identifiers
- 991005845958007891
- Murdoch Affiliation
- Indo-Pacific Research Centre
- Resource Type
- Thesis
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