Sandra McKay (PhD Candidate) has published an article "Critical minerals or criminal miners? The (in)formalization of artisanal and small-scale copper mining in Peru," in The Extractive Industries and Society.
Using Peru as a case study, Sandra argues that "the temporary yet unending informalization policies of ASM [artisanal and small-scale mining] constitute an institutionalized frontier moment, whereby informal miners are positioned in a limbo between criticality and criminality: their products enter the global supply chain as 'legal-enough' critical minerals, but the miners remain not fully legal, effectively delinking resource users from the costs of extraction."
Sandra is PhD Candidate in the Department of Global Development Studies working under the supervision of Dr. Rebecca Hall. Sandra's research focuses on the mining and development debate, specially looking at the conditions that influence the role that artisanal and small-scale gold mining has in improving local sustainable livelihoods in Peru. These include issues such as the negotiation and conflicts between large-scale mining and community-based small-scale mining, trade and cooperation between Canada and Peru, and private governance initiatives.