Exposing ideological effects of mediational means variation or alignment in stakeholders’ impact discourses

The mining industry’s links to sustainable development (SD) often trigger a struggle over mining’s impact representations. For instance, there are politics of what issue to communicate and whose interest is served by mining SD representations. To represent mining’s impact, stakeholders prefer one meaning-making system over another. In the social world, no semiotic system choice is neutral. Rather, they are mediated by social actors’ values and interests. What has not been extensively studied is how stakeholders’ choice of a mediational means over another indexicalise the stakeholders’ ideology manifested in the discursive strategies of positive in-group and negative out-group representations. Investigating stakeholders' mediational means choices can facilitate stakeholders’ engagement because it affects how people relate to others in society. Data is generated from an interview tour of a mining company’s physical settings and selected portions of the Chief Executive Officer’s (CEO) letter to the stakeholders. The concepts of ideological use of mediational means and mediational means as historical, informed the empirical analysis. The findings of this study show that the local activists used ethnographic photographs to engage in negative othering, but the company used disembodied visuals to engage in positive self-representation. We conclude that the politics of mining impact representation must be understood as involving an irreducible tension between ‘what is out there’ in the physical settings and the stakeholder's ideological use of ‘what is out there’ to engage in either a positive self-representation or a negative othering. Policy measures aimed at resolving mining companies and communities' struggles must uncover the hidden interests and values behind semiotic resources used to communicate impact.