Abstract: Debt is widely conceived as temporal – present consumption bought with future labour. This paper advances conceptualisations of debt by incorporating the active role space plays in creating, maintaining and undermining debt relations. Debts are topological binds – a particular kind of spatial connection, which are entangled with topographic spaces to produce debt ecologies. […]

Excerpt: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has gone to court to gain ownership of isolated pockets of land tucked away within his sprawling estate in Hawaii, many of which are less than an acre and could be split between hundreds of owners in a situation unique to the islands. The 14 parcels on the north shore […]

Excerpt: Settler colonialism is not one historical event.  It is a structure, and the process of settling continues today. That process is not more evident in North America than at Standing Rock. The Dakota Access Pipeline is a 1,172 mile long oil pipeline, constructed to carry hydraulically fractured crude oil from the Bakken fields of […]

Abstract: Why did the lands east of the Urals–long associated by Russians with the hard labor of convicts, fearsome nomads, and an unbearable climate–attract so many Russian peasant settlers at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? Historians usually cite a combination of push-pull factors. They represent migration as a consequence of stagnation […]

Abstract: Over the last ten years, there has been extensive scholarly debate about the nature of settler colonialism and the category ‘settler’. The central problem animating this dissertation is the question of how we understand the position of a settler group like the Doukhobors in Canadian settler colonialism. In 1899 approximately 7,500 members of the […]

Abstract: In this third progress report I consider the politics of settler colonialism in relation to nonnative people of color. Settler colonialism has become an increasingly important concept over the past decade, and while geographers typically think about it from a white/native perspective, I explore how ethnic studies, specifically, Chicana/o studies, has responded to it. […]

Abstract: This essay considers the histories of two countercultural, back-to-the-land communes located in northern California: Siskiyou County’s Black Bear Ranch and Sonoma County’s Morning Star Ranch. Both of these communes were highly influenced by the concept of Open Land, according to which anyone may freely live in a given space, particularly those individuals rejected or […]

Description: This book begins with a simple question: why do so many Dominicans deny the African components of their DNA, culture, and history? Seeking answers, Milagros Ricourt uncovers a complex and often contradictory Dominican racial imaginary. Observing how Dominicans have traditionally identified in opposition to their neighbors on the island of Hispaniola—Haitians of African descent—she […]

Excerpt: ‘When this square is thus laid off and supplied, lay off another in the same way, and so fill up the world‘. (With thanks to Alex Young)

Excerpt: In July 2014 the Center for American Progress released a study titled Missing the Point: The Real Impact of Mascots and Team Names on American Indian and Alaska Native Youth. Written by Erik Stegman and Victoria Phillips, this study further substantiated that the use of Indian team names and mascots has a clear negative […]