Abstract: Using Foucault and Agamben’s theories of the state’s project of nation building through the inclusive exclusion of bodies, the author casts the Israel-Palestine conflict in different light. The forcible removal of Palestinians is reexamined and situated in the larger narratives surrounding both the creation of the Israeli state and the nature of US biopolitics.

Abstract: Studying the work of the Springs Stewardship Institute in Northern Arizona, this project considers how springs ecologists work within and against settler colonialism. First, I consider Flagstaff as a settler society, arguing that early settler military expeditions were formative in producing knowledge about and settler dispositions towards springs. Putting Aldo Leopold’s writings on land health […]

Description: In Producing Predators, Michael D. Wise argues that contestations between Native and non-Native people over hunting, labor, and the livestock industry drove the development of predator eradication programs in Montana and Alberta from the 1880s onward. The history of these anti-predator programs was significant not only for their ecological effects, but also for their enduring […]

Abstract: Despite vocal opposition from the indigenous people, public hearing processes in Canada play an important part in determining whether or not oil and gas pipeline development projects will be approved. Attention to hearing as an aesthetic and political practice has been theorized by the Canadian composer and sound theorist R. Murray Schafer as a fundamental […]

Description: In Florida, land and water frequently change places with little warning, dissolving homes and communities along with the very concepts of boundaries themselves. While Florida’s landscape of saturated swamps, shifting shorelines, coral reefs, and tiny keys initially impeded familiar strategies of early U.S. settlement, such as the establishment of fixed dwellings, sturdy fences, and cultivated […]

Description: In Perishing Heathens Julius H. Rubin tells the stories of missionary men and women who between 1800 and 1830 responded to the call to save Native peoples through missions, especially the Osages in the Arkansas Territory, Cherokees in Tennessee and Georgia, and Ojibwe peoples in the Michigan Territory. Rubin also recounts the lives of Native […]

Abstract: The exponential growth of temporary migration to Australia since the late 1990s has unsettled the model of permanent migration, state supported settlement and multicultural citizenship on which Australia has been built. This article draws attention to the emergence of a gulf between Australia’s immigration policies and social policy frameworks for migrant integration in the course […]

Excerpt: Any consideration of what sovereignty has come to mean in Native North America, as a conceptual framework that names a particular kind of lived indigenous experience, has to be understood within the context of settler colonialism. Yet anthropology has been slow to take up settler colonialism as a key analytic, even though the discipline has […]

Abstract: Familiar to most anyone with knowledge of U.S. history, antebellum Indian removal likely evokes a drama comprised of two roles: on one hand, Indian peoples as represented by elite Cherokee activists, and, on the other, their political antagonists in the nascent states’ rights movement, among whom the infamous Andrew Jackson stands both as agent and […]

Abstract: This dissertation is an ethnography of the body as medium in the North American Spiritualist tradition. With its origins in the “burned-over district” of upstate New York, Spiritualism is a homegrown religious movement rooted in the radical Protestant milieu of “Great Awakenings,” which evolved into an international religious movement with a distinctly secular bent. Spiritualists, […]