A curation of articles, essays, book reviews and interviews on critical geographical concerns.
Writings that critically engage the distinct form of colonialism that functions through the displacement and elimination of indigenous lands and lives with a settler society, with particular focus on its ongoing spatial presence as a system of power. Entries in this section also attend to engagements with and within Indigenous communities that foreground indigenous resurgence, resistance, and self-determination.
This essay argues that the COVID-19 pandemic simultaneously shapes and is shaped by the interconnected goals of indigenous politics. Thus, it is not possible to address it solely as a health emergency. It is connected to indigenous autonomy and self-determination. It is connected to the exploitation of land and the territory. It is connected to the rights of indigenous peoples to continue to exist and exercise their cultures.
Together, this piece contends that racial capitalist and settler colonial logics are (re)produced through digital mediations of the internet, such that digital geographies are ontologically and epistemologically always oriented around racial capitalism and settler colonialism.
The endless piling up of administrative decisions, regulations, and requirements, has produced another kind of spaces of waiting, where the precarities of living under the uncertainty and arbitrariness of occupation are recognized without alleviation. It is hardly a surprise significant portion of the practices of postponement and delay take place near the proliferating settlements.
Emilie Cameron’s "Far Off Metal River" is a masterful and carefully written book that addresses pressing theoretical and methodological questions for postcolonial studies, nature-society relations, and Indigenous geographies. The book is situated in and around Kugluktuk, Nunavut, where it examines how southern relations with northern peoples and places have been constituted in and through story and storytelling.
In Spaces Between Us, Morgensen recalls his first visit to a rural retreat in southern Oregon belonging to the Radical Faeries, a back-to-the-land collective of predominantly white urban American gay counter-culturists. In his efforts at decolonization, Morgensen takes issue with the means by which queer politics achieve citizenship through normatively non-Native belonging to a settler nation.
Drawing on an analysis of government records obtained using Access to Information and Privacy requests, key informant interviews, and a three-year engagement with land defenders and allies, we demonstrate how property and jurisdiction carved the contested space into distinct spheres of settler governing authority.
This paper examines the eliminatory speed of Israeli settler colonialism, particularly the ways in which settler organizations aim to accelerate the pace of elimination at the colonial frontiers in Palestine.
Focusing on Canada as a settler colonial liberal democracy, I look at the Indian Act which has supported colonial dispossession and assimilation in Canada for almost 200 years and rely on Brenna Bhandar’s conceptualization of “racial regimes of property” as a means of examining how racial subjects and private property are co-produced.
This article interrogates some of the logics and fundamental assumptions that underpin the arguments of liberal property rights enthusiasts, questioning their applicability to the values and aspirations of the Tŝilhqot’in people and First Nations broadly.
This paper examines two space science infrastructures in Hawai'i, the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) and the Hawai'i Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS). It considers how scientific observation and colonial occupation are co-constituted through the production of apparatuses – extensive material practices and arrangements that iteratively produce subject–object relations.