Mining knowledge from below: Miners’ epistemology and the political ecology of opal mining in Brazil

• State institutions and external experts dominate epistemic authority in media coverage of opal mining. • Miners are rarely represented as legitimate knowledge producers in the analyzed news corpus. • International scientific validation is more visible than local experiential knowledge in media narratives. • Economic and technical frames prevail, while conflict, inequality, and participation remain marginal. • Media narratives reproduce epistemic asymmetries within artisanal extractive governance. Extractive activities in the Global South are frequently framed through narratives of development, sustainability, and modernization, often obscuring the power relations and epistemic hierarchies shaping mining territories. Although artisanal mining is commonly portrayed as a driver of regional development, little is known about how media coverage constructs hierarchies of knowledge and legitimacy, particularly regarding the visibility of miners’ knowledge. This study investigates how media narratives shape epistemic authority and legitimacy within extractive governance. Drawing on Political Ecology and the Coloniality of Power, the research analyzes a corpus of 35 Brazilian news articles on artisanal opal mining in Pedro II, Piauí, Brazil, collected through Google News up to June 24, 2025. The methodological approach combines exploratory lexical analysis using Voyant Tools with qualitative content analysis to identify recurring discursive patterns, actor representation, and credibility attribution. The findings show that media coverage assigns epistemic credibility mainly to international scientific authority (40% of the corpus), especially through NASA-related framing, and to state and public institutions (23%), while miners appear as the primary source of authority in only 5.7% of the analyzed articles. Economic and technical frames predominate in the corpus, whereas conflict, participation, and locally grounded knowledge receive limited visibility. These results indicate that media discourse contributes to the reproduction of epistemic asymmetries in extractive governance. The study therefore contributes to debates on extractive governance, epistemic justice, and the role of media in reproducing knowledge hierarchies.