8 October 2025. Remapping Minerals and International Development: In conversation with Lian Sinclair

As demand for critical minerals surges in the transition to a low-carbon economy, struggles over extraction, supply chains, and resource sovereignty have moved to the centre of global politics. Once seen as raw inputs for development, minerals now anchor competing visions of the future—green, multipolar, and post-extractive. What does this renewed centrality of minerals mean for the trajectories and underlying logics of international development? And how might critical perspectives help us remap the material, legal, political, and cultural foundations of the mineral frontier?

This conversation is the second in the series ‘Remapping International Development’, co-convened by LPGCIL and the La Trobe International and Comparative Law Cluster.

Lian Sinclair is postdoctoral research fellow in Geography at Sydney University’s School of Geosciences. Her current research is on critical mineral global production networks, including the interplay of corporate and state strategies to develop new resource regions in Australia. Lian is also an honorary research fellow at the Indo-Pacific Research Centre, Murdoch University, where they completed their PhD in 2020. Adjacent to academia, Lian is chairperson of the Mineral Policy Institute, a civil society think tank facilitating dialogue across climate, environment, First Nations and workers’ organisations about the role of mining in a just energy transition.

8 October, 5.30pm, La Trobe City Campus (room details to come).