Gillespie, KellyRabbaney, Zaakiyah2023-07-242024-03-202023-07-242024-03-202022https://hdl.handle.net/10566/9462Magister Artium - MADeveloped in the 1980s on an abandoned Anglo American coal mine, Old Coronation informal settlement in Mpumalanga is a site of environmental, infrastructural, social, and economic ruin. This thesis looks into the lives of the residents of Old Coronation as they navigate their existence in a scarcely-habitable environment compounded by poverty, joblessness, struggle, and historical and ongoing extractivist processes. The thesis intends to understand the lives of Old Coronation residents as they negotiate survival in a political and economic system, and mineral industry, in which their lives and futures have been abandoned. The main argument is that because of racial capitalism, neoliberalism, and extractivist processes, Old Coronation residents are forced into a life of extreme effort: making and remaking life always against threats, the escape of which only heightens the exposure to further threat.enInformal settlementsMpumalangaPovertyMineral industryEcosystemUniversity of the Western Cape