From Buried Treasure and Risky Adventure to Sobering Matters of Concern: the Ring of Fire Discourse in Ontario Mining Events

• Main Author: Vescio, Brianne L.
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: Scholarship@Western 2018
• Subjects: Mining; Spectacle; Corporate Social Responsibility; Futures; Event Anthropology; Ontario Ring of Fire; Social and Cultural Anthropology; First Nations
• Online Access: https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/5969; https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/context/etd/article/7928/viewcontent/auto_convert.pdf

The Ontario Ring of Fire is a potential mining project that is located in the far north of the province, within Matawa First Nations homelands and traditional territory. My thesis examines how the Ring of Fire is continually shaped by the conflicting discourses that surround it. To study this, I observed how the Ring of Fire was situated within five mining events. Events were held by different organizations, for different audiences, and had different purposes; varying widely in size and scale. While some actors deployed spectacularly streamlined messages to entice investors and propel the project towards a predetermined future, others unraveled these messages by exploring the complications and revealing a wider range of possibilities. However, events largely acted as silos, and the observed encounters across difference mostly took place through the media. This allowed some organizations that were represented at multiple events to significantly shift their message between audiences. My hope is that this research provides a historical account of how the Ring of Fire was (or wasn’t) conjured into being during a time of widespread political change. It may also contribute to the field of event anthropology, and it may provide an account of the changing face of CSR.