Below is a collection of essays and articles written by critical scholars and commentators about one of the most widely extracted materials on earth: sand. This list has been compiled with the assistance of many colleagues and peers at conferences and workshops over the last few years. It is not meant to be an exhaustive list, but will help in establishing a starting point for anyone interested in studying the global politics of sand.

Architecture, F. (n.d.). Singapore’s Scentless Growth is Built on the Brutal Extraction of Cambodian Sand and Imported Labour. Failed Architecture. Retrieved May 4, 2021, from https://failedarchitecture.com/singapores-scentless-growth-is-built-on-the-brutal-extraction-of-cambodian-sand-and-imported-labour/

Ardhanari, M. (n.d.). Sand extractivism and its inequalities: 60. Ardhanari—Sand extractivism and its inequalities.pdf. (n.d.). Retrieved September 28, 2021, from https://researchcentres.city.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/623398/CITYPERC-WPS-2021-06-Ardhanari.pdf

Arnez, M. (2021). The granularity of sand: Analogies of production, consumption, and distribution. Dialogues in Human Geography, 11(2), 298–301. https://doi.org/10.1177/20438206211004857

Beiser, V. (2017, February 27). Sand mining: The global environmental crisis you’ve probably never heard of. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/feb/27/sand-mining-global-environmental-crisis-never-heard

Beiser, V. (2018). The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization (First Edition). Riverhead Books.

Bendixen, M., Best, J., Hackney, C., & Iversen, L. L. (2019). Time is running out for sand. Nature, 571(7763), 29–31. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-02042-4

Bisht, A. (2021). Conceptualizing sand extractivism: Deconstructing an emerging resource frontier. The Extractive Industries and Society, 8(2), 100904. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.exis.2021.100904

Bridge, G. (2021). Thinking with the grain. Dialogues in Human Geography, 11(2), 302–306. https://doi.org/10.1177/20438206211004858

Brigstocke, J. (2021). The Aesthetics of Sand: Reclaiming Hong Kong’s Unsettled Grounds. GeoHumanities, 0(0), 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/2373566X.2020.1847679

cities .of. Sand. (n.d.). Rare_earth. Retrieved September 28, 2021, from https://www.rareearth-art.com/citiesofsandpodcast

Cole, L. (n.d.). Sand: Is the extraction of the world’s most-mined commodity sustainable? – Geographical Magazine. Retrieved September 28, 2021, from https://geographical.co.uk/people/development/item/3767-sand-the-single-most-mined-commodity

Dawson, K. (2021). Geologising Urban Political Ecology (UPE): The Urbanisation of Sand in Accra, Ghana. Antipode, 53(4), 995–1017. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12718

Films, G. P. (2019, January 3). Lost World. https://vimeo.com/309335117

Forman, P. (2021). Materialist dialogues and the granular. Dialogues in Human Geography, 11(2), 307–310. https://doi.org/10.1177/20438206211004859

GEAS_Mar2014_Sand_Mining.pdf. (n.d.). Retrieved September 28, 2021, from https://wedocs.unep.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.11822/8665/GEAS_Mar2014_Sand_Mining.pdf?sequence=3&isAllowed=y

Harvard Design Magazine: Built on Sand: Singapore and the New State of Risk. (n.d.). Retrieved September 28, 2021, from http://www.harvarddesignmagazine.org/issues/39/built-on-sand-singapore-and-the-new-state-of-risk

Hass—Buried in Sand Understanding Precarity in the Con.pdf. (n.d.). Retrieved September 28, 2021, from https://ruor.uottawa.ca/bitstream/10393/41720/1/Buried%20in%20Sand_Final%20Version_JHASS_January_2021.pdf

Hoffmann, M. (2021). Digging for sand after the revolution: Mafia, labor, and shamanism in a Nepali sand mine. Dialectical Anthropology, 45, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-020-09615-0

Intervention – “Sedimentary Justice: A Planetary Politics of Shifting Sediment.” (2021, July 12). Antipode Online. https://antipodeonline.org/2021/07/12/sedimentary-justice/

Jamieson, W. (2017). There’s Sand in My Infinity Pool: Land Reclamation and the Rewriting of Singapore. GeoHumanities, 3(2), 396–413. https://doi.org/10.1080/2373566X.2017.1279021

Jamieson, W. (2021a). For granular geography. Dialogues in Human Geography, 11(2), 275–293. https://doi.org/10.1177/2043820620950053

Jamieson, W. (2021b). One or several granular geographies? Dialogues in Human Geography, 11(2), 311–314. https://doi.org/10.1177/20438206211004860

John, R. (n.d.). Sand geographies: Disentangling the material foundations of the built environment. Geography Compass, n/a(n/a). https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12560

Jonah, F. E., Adjei-Boateng, D., Agbo, N. W., Mensah, E. A., & Edziyie, R. E. (2015). Assessment of sand and stone mining along the coastline of Cape Coast, Ghana. Annals of GIS, 21(3), 223–231. https://doi.org/10.1080/19475683.2015.1007894

Koehnken, L., Rintoul, M. S., Goichot, M., Tickner, D., Loftus, A.-C., & Acreman, M. C. (2020). Impacts of riverine sand mining on freshwater ecosystems: A review of the scientific evidence and guidance for future research. River Research and Applications, 36(3), 362–370. https://doi.org/10.1002/rra.3586

Kothari, U. (2021). Multiplicities of sandscapes and granular geographies. Dialogues in Human Geography, 11(2), 294–297. https://doi.org/10.1177/20438206211004856

Lamb, V., Marschke, M., & Rigg, J. (2019a). Trading Sand, Undermining Lives: Omitted Livelihoods in the Global Trade in Sand. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 109(5), 1511–1528. https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2018.1541401

Leal Filho, W., Hunt, J., Lingos, A., Platje, J., Vieira, L., Will, M., & Gavriletea, M. (2021). The Unsustainable Use of Sand: Reporting on a Global Problem. Sustainability, 13(6), 3356. https://doi.org/10.3390/su13063356

Mark—The Governance of Global Sand Mining.pdf. (n.d.). Retrieved September 28, 2021, from https://uwspace.uwaterloo.ca/bitstream/handle/10012/16946/Mark_Melissa.pdf?sequence=5&isAllowed=y

Meredith, S. (2021, March 5). A sand shortage? The world is running out of a crucial — but under-appreciated — commodity. CNBC. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/05/sand-shortage-the-world-is-running-out-of-a-crucial-commodity.html

Miller, M. A. (2021). A Transboundary Political Ecology of Volcanic Sand Mining. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 0(0), 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2021.1914539

Radford, S., & Lamb, V. (2020). Work and struggle of fishing livelihoods in the Delta: Development and ‘new’ change along the Ayeyarwady (Irrawaddy) River, Myanmar. Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 61(2), 338–352. https://doi.org/10.1111/apv.12256

Rousseau, J.-F., Schoenberger, L., Marschke, M., & Hoffmann, M. (n.d.). Roving bandits and looted coastlines: How the global appetite for sand is fuelling a crisis. The Conversation. Retrieved September 28, 2021, from http://theconversation.com/roving-bandits-and-looted-coastlines-how-the-global-appetite-for-sand-is-fuelling-a-crisis-132412

Sengupta, D., Chen, R., & Meadows, M. E. (2018). Building beyond land: An overview of coastal land reclamation in 16 global megacities. Applied Geography, 90, 229–238. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apgeog.2017.12.015

Shifting_sand_final.pdf. (n.d.). Retrieved September 28, 2021, from https://cdn.globalwitness.org/archive/files/pdfs/shifting_sand_final.pdf

Singapore: The politics of taking sand to make land – FP2P. (n.d.). Retrieved September 28, 2021, from https://oxfamapps.org/fp2p/singapore-the-politics-of-taking-sand-to-make-land/

The Hidden Environmental Toll of Mining the World’s Sand. (n.d.). Yale E360. Retrieved September 28, 2021, from https://e360.yale.edu/features/the-hidden-environmental-toll-of-mining-the-worlds-sand

Torres, A., Brandt, J., Lear, K., & Liu, J. (2017). A looming tragedy of the sand commons. Science, 357(6355), 970–971. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aao0503

Torres, A., Liu, J. “Jack,” Brandt, J., & Lear, K. (n.d.). The world is facing a global sand crisis. The Conversation. Retrieved September 28, 2021, from http://theconversation.com/the-world-is-facing-a-global-sand-crisis-83557

Torres, A., Simoni, M. U., Keiding, J. K., Müller, D. B., zu Ermgassen, S. O. S. E., Liu, J., Jaeger, J. A. G., Winter, M., & Lambin, E. F. (2021). Sustainability of the global sand system in the Anthropocene. One Earth, 4(5), 639–650. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2021.04.011

Tracking the Source of Illegal Sand Mining. (n.d.). Discover Magazine. Retrieved September 28, 2021, from https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/tracking-the-source-of-illegal-sand-mining

Uncovering sand mining’s impacts on the world’s rivers. (n.d.). Retrieved September 28, 2021, from https://wwf.panda.org/wwf_news/?333451/Uncovering-sand-minings-impacts-on-the-worlds-rivers

van Arragon—Livelihoods Built On Sand Exposing the Precarity .pdf. (n.d.). Retrieved September 28, 2021, from https://ruor.uottawa.ca/bitstream/10393/42454/7/van_Arragon_Lukas_2021_Thesis.pdf