Beyond technical fixes: Power, epistemic exclusion and mining safety in Türkiye
THE EXTRACTIVE INDUSTRIES AND SOCIETY, cilt.29, ss.1-9, 2026 (SSCI, Scopus)
- Yayın Türü: Makale / Tam Makale
- Cilt numarası: 29
- Basım Tarihi: 2026
- Doi Numarası: 10.1016/j.exis.2026.102079
- Dergi Adı: THE EXTRACTIVE INDUSTRIES AND SOCIETY
- Derginin Tarandığı İndeksler: Scopus, Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), INSPEC
- Sayfa Sayıları: ss.1-9
- Dokuz Eylül Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet
Özet
Coal mining remains among the most dangerous occupations in the world, yet mine safety has largely been treated as a technical and regulatory problem rather than a question of power. This article argues that occu- pational safety in mining is, in important part, a matter of epistemic power: of whose knowledge of hazard is recognized as legitimate and whose is excluded from the decisions that shape who is protected. Drawing on Haugaard's typology of power, Fricker's concept of epistemic injustice and a tri dimensional equity framework from environmental justice scholarship, the study conducts a documentary analysis of mine safety governance in Türkiye, which recorded the highest coal mining fatality rate among major producers in the period for which comparative data are available. It reconstructs the subject positions of three actor groups, the state-corporate, the engineering-professional and the workers' experiential and argues that they occupy a determinate hierarchy of epistemic authority. Across three disasters, at the Soma (2014) and Amasra (2022) coal mines and the S¸ irvan (2016) copper mine, a consistent configuration emerges: accurate knowledge of a specific hazard existed and was communicated, yet those who held it lacked the authority to interrupt production. Rather than displacing technical and organizational explanations, epistemic exclusion is proposed as the mechanism that binds them. Comparative evidence, drawn with due caution, indicates that mining mortality is responsive to governance rather than fixed by the character of coal. Recognizing worker knowledge and redistributing epistemic authority are therefore constitutive of just extractive governance.