Abstract: This paper contributes to scholarship on settler colonial urbanism by examining the historical constitution of Canada’s National Capital Region at the intersection of racial capitalism and settler colonization. Its impetus arises from four years of solidarity work with Algonquin land defenders and accomplices struggling to reclaim Asinabka, an Algonquin sacred complex of islands and waterfalls in the Kitchissippi (Ottawa River) between the Canadian cities of Ottawa and Gatineau. Situating the current struggle within the 200 years of crisis and consolidation that produced the Ottawa Valley, we track the entwined histories of settler capitalists transforming Asinabka in response to the shifting demands of racial capitalism alongside the ceaseless effort by Algonquin people to exercise jurisdiction over the islands in the face of colonial incursion and theft. To do so, we read across 100 years of colonial archives in conjunction with settler historiographies of the lumber industry. We argue that while local in form, Asinabka’s transformations were constitutive of place- and race-making processes at a variety of scales and sites throughout Algonquin territory. We conclude by considering how traces of this history are recursively mobilized in the present to transform Asinabka into an investment property.

Abstract: My dissertation explores ways that engaging with the history of settler colonialism should matter to work in contemporary political philosophy. I begin by critiquing the state of the debate in the philosophy of immigration. The most popular arguments for open borders–the view that people should nearly always be able to live and travel wherever they wish– are parallel to arguments historically made to justify settler colonialism. Unless seriously qualified, these arguments have the counterintuitive consequence that most historical settler colonialism was justified; they also have dire consequences for the rights of indigenous peoples today. However, most of the popular arguments for immigration restrictions also fail to account for the rights of indigenous peoples. How, then, can we understand the principled basis of those rights? I offer my own justification of territorial rights and (some) border controls based on NeoRoman republicanism. This is the view that the purpose of political institutions is to protect people from domination, where domination is understood as subjection to the arbitrary will of another. There is a growing literature on the question of what (if anything) is wrong with colonialism apart from obvious wrongs that are often perpetrated by colonizers such as physical violence, enslavement, and the displacement of colonized people from their homes. I argue that colonialism is a wrong even in the absence of violence etc. because it involves domination in the sense just mentioned. Furthermore, I argue that rights to control territory and impose (some) restrictions on immigration are justified as a means of preventing domination by settlers. Philip Pettit, the most influential neo-Roman republican, has argued that a state is necessary to secure non-domination. This would seem to imply that my justification of territorial rights as a means of preventing domination does not apply to non-state societies. In response to this objection, I draw on defenses of non-state forms of governance in American Indian/First Nations philosophy as well as the actual history of non-state societies to rebut Pettit’s arguments: non-state societies can successfully protect their members from domination and have actually done so.

Abstract: This article interrogates the racial logics of home and homemaking. It opens up the conceptual terrain of home to property – a technology of racial dispossession and handmaid of racial capitalism. I reconceptualize home as dominion and as belonging. Unhoming names the synergies between these modalities that authorizes the unmaking of racialized subjects’ homes. I argue unhoming is a structural feature of racial capitalism and position resistance to unhoming as homemaking that might rescript propertied landscapes. Repositioning home as practised in propertied landscapes centres homemaking’s life-giving and death-dealing contradictions and excavates the work home does for – and (might do) to disrupt – liberal property regimes.

Abstract: This paper argues that the ‘living with nature’ movement and technocratic responses, such as Nature-based Solutions, are ideological fantasies of curation. Technocratic responses tend to reify a neo-liberal notion of the nonhuman as an ‘ecosystem service’ to humans which can be nurtured, abandoned or sacrificed. The so-called ‘living with nature’ debate often hinges on anthropocentric notions of whether human/nonhuman habitation is compossible. Arguments that urban residents should ‘get close to nature’, frequently assume that living with nature is ‘good’ for the planet and, in particular, good for people. Critics, however, point out the zoonotic threats which arise from encounters with nonhuman-borne pathogens and vectors. Planned interventions involve censorship, editing and curation. We explain curation as a power-laden activity of selection and organisation, inclusion and exclusion which, in relation to urban planning, perpetuates settler colonialism. This paper argues the need to appreciate that many human and nonhuman residents are uninvited guests in nonhuman habitat on unceded Indigenous lands. In agreement with Smith that ‘ecological disruption is a symptom of a way of life — an imperial mode of existence’ which perpetuates the colonial settler regime, this paper suggests that many planners, developers and suburban dwellers in Australia demonstrate what Baldwin  terms ‘culpable innocence’. This is not an innocence of blameless lack of knowledge, but rather a disavowal that settler colonialism, land fragmentation and urban expansion have caused, and continue to be implicated in, the disruption and destruction of hundreds of thousands of human and non-human lives. Australia, and its urban fringes in particular, are antagonistic landscapes. As Sen explains, antagonistic landscapes ‘require the erasure of what already exists’, where powerful actors antagonise ‘unwanted’ communities of humans and non-humans. Colonisation, therefore, is ongoing, undertaken with the complicity of planners as space curators. In the view of the authors, planners must attend to inherited settler-colonial practices of curating nonhuman life and death in settler cities. It is time for planners to ask the question about decoloniality. Decoloniality, unlike decolonisation, does not assume that colonialism has ended and it can, therefore, be historicised. Decolonisation, as popularly used, risks domestication, recentring whiteness and resettling theory in one more form of settler colonialism. Decoloniality, in contrast, seeks to delink from Western-centric epistemologies that silence or marginalise non-white voices. It seeks to transgress the borders of Western thinking, to avoid universalism and emphasise the epistemic locus of enunciation of the human and nonhuman subjects.

Extended date for Abstracts: 20^th of June 2022

Call for Submission of Abstracts

The Second International Conference of Graduate Students in the Social Sciences is organized by students of the PhD program in Social Sciences at Birzeit University, Palestine. The conference provides a diverse international platform for knowledge exchange and scholarly engagement bringing together graduate students located at Universities across the world, with a special emphasis on promoting south-south student dialogue. This conference will focus on multiple theoretical and methodological perspectives that engage various dimensions of contemporary studies of settler colonialism with a focus on three main themes: space and place; time, temporality and memory; and experiences and potentialities of the everyday.

The two-day conference aims to diversify dominant scholarly approaches to the specificity of settler colonialism, as well as open up space for new thinking around issues of de-colonial and anticolonial knowledge and practice.  In particular the Conference is interested in addressing forms of everyday negotiation, confrontation, and tools of resistance that may cast light on what it means to live under a settler colonial system and extend our understanding of the ways in which to confront it. Accordingly, we seek research papers that cast light towards developing new critical analytics, concepts, tools and methodologies in ways that complicate our understanding of the temporal and spatial dynamics of settler colonial processes and lived experiences of colonization.  The conference also seeks to extend the dialogue about the role of social science knowledge production and research as they have developed from the different locations and colonial experiences and contexts — past and present. Ultimately the Conference asks – how might we build an alternative vision that bridges past experiences, current realities and imagined futures?

We are seeking conference paper abstracts under the following five sub-themes:

1. Space, Place and settler colonialism: the spatialization of colonial power; experiences of structural and spatial violence; narratives of place; relationalities to land; bodies, borders – recognition and sovereignties

 2. Indigenous knowledge: Indigenous knowledge as methodology, tools of decolonization in indigenous experience; solidarities and political alternatives

3. Everyday life under colonialisms: the changing semantics and semiotics of everyday life; strategies, tactics and survival; contested meanings – negotiation, steadfastness, and tools of adaptation.

4. Temporality/ Memory and colonialism: temporalities and colonial processes and experiences; memory, commemoration and mnemonic practices; media and memory; the politics of museums, archives, heritage and cultural preservation; colonialism and sensory memory; futurity.

5. Knowledge as tool of resistance: practices of critical knowledge; emancipatory education; educational curricula; social media as alternative sites of solidarities and resistance.

TO APPLY

Deadline for Abstracts: Interested persons are requested to submit abstracts of their research papers with a maximum of 500 words in Arabic or English no later than the 20^th of June 2022 to the email IGSC.PhD@birzeit.edu

Conference Applicants: Should be PhD students at any stage of their training or research (pre-graduation) in any discipline of the Social Sciences. Please enclose with your application a CV and one paragraph biography that also specifies if you want to attend the Conference physically or virtually and whether you will be in need of financial aid in order to attend.

Applicants will be informed of the decision of the Conference Committee by mid-July/ July 2022, while draft papers are due October 1, 2022.

Conference Format: The two -day Conference will be held in a hybrid format to enable participants who face travel restrictions to attend.

Conference language: Arabic and English will be the two languages (and abstracts and papers) ​. Simultaneous translation will be provided at the Conference.

Financial Aid: A number of full and partial travel and accommodation grants are available for overseas participants. On having an abstract accepted, applicants wishing to receive financial aid will be required to provide the necessary documents and fill an application form – as well as provide an estimated cost of travel expenses. Participants who receive support will be received accommodated in local hotels.

Conference Registration: All participants are required to register for the conference. Registration covers lunches and coffee breaks during the conference – registration is free.

For further details about the conference, please do not hesitate to send an email to: IGSC.PhD@birzeit.edu

Abstract: We evaluate the complexity of temporary migration schemes in contrast to the longstanding approach to immigration as a key aspect of nation-building in settler societies. Until the early 1990s, predominantly one-way, permanent immigration schemes were preferred in settler societies such as Australia. In an increasingly fluid global context, temporary migrants are more susceptible to forms of abuse and exploitation in a host society, with fewer forms of redress due to their status as non-citizens
and non-permanent residents. Taking a specific focus upon Australia, we contextualize the experiences of temporary migrants both prior to and under the conditions of COVID-19. Our key argument is that temporary migration schemes are organised and structured not only to favour states, as well as employers and businesses, but that the stripping back of rights to those who enter these schemes
is a deliberative aspect of the state approach.

Abstract: Throughout history the agency of social citizenship has resulted in actions that both include and exclude certain individuals and groups through political, economic, and civic interaction. This creates abject spaces of limited rights, inclusion and belonging. Divergent and nested lived experiences of how processes and practices of social citizenship are enacted, embodied, and emplaced necessitate a re-problematizing of the context from the hegemonic view of Canada as a pluralistic liberal multicultural state to one where multiple divergent epistemologies collide in a state of continued settler colonialism. This comparative case study in the Pacific Northwest of what is now called Canada explores how two civil society organizations (CSOs) facilitate or hinder Settler and Indigenous individuals’, groups’, and communities’ agency through social action. CSOs are sites of social action that have the power to create spaces where all citizens have a voice in their own social well-being through participation, partnership, and power sharing. The re-problematizing allows for the exploration of how the reframing of political and civil space impacts interactions and relationships to investigate what these sites tell us about participants’ perceptions and lived experiences of interlocking oppressions, power, and agency in the lived experience of processes and practices of social citizenship.

Abstract: US public parks are ideological sites where settler-colonial curriculum of territoriality is enacted through their organization and design. However, public parks and the rhetorics of nature and democracy that often frame them are rarely problematized as White settler projects occupying the colonized land. Drawing on the scholarship of decolonial, land-based education, this article critiques the narratives of US urban parks’ undergirding settler-colonial curricula and discusses a student-developed artistic intervention executed in a local public park. The ‘Lederer Park Placards Project’ is explored as both pedagogical gesture and art-based research, which engages in settler-colonial critique through site-specific installation to surface the erasure of Indigenous realities and to divert the existing settler-colonial narratives of public places. This art-in-action is discussed as a decolonial gesture intended to disrupt the White, Eurocentric, colonial curricula embedded in US public parks.

Abstract: Israeli innovations in “green” technology are ostensibly aimed at sustainable resource management and climate change mitigation. But sustainable development and environmental (in)justice in Palestine/Israel need to be examined through interdisciplinary perspectives that account for the broader settler colonial and neoliberal contexts in which they occur. Taking into account the historical and geographic context of Israel’s scientific development, we argue that Israel’s green technologies are fundamentally structured by the Zionist project of appropriating Palestinian lands. Within settler colonial analysis, environmental injustice comprises part of a broader pattern of settler domination of Indigenous ecological relations, requiring attending not to ‘equity’ in relations with the state and environment but a reckoning with settler privilege and the return of land to Indigenous communities. We analyze the use of environmental infrastructures—specifically in the areas of waste management, renewable energy, and agricultural technologies (“agritech”)—as mechanisms for land appropriation and dispossession in Palestine/Israel. Our analysis of ‘greenwashing’ as a rhetorical strategy asserts that regardless of the ecological impact of individual technologies, in Israel’s settler colonial context they further indigenous dispossession and elimination and are therefore incommensurable with long-term socio-ecological resilience. Through this analysis of Israeli greenwashing, we discuss Israeli sustainability initiatives and technological innovations not as ahistorical discourses, commodities, or technologies, but as elements of a historically situated settler colonial project.

Description: Faint traces of Indigenous people and their histories abound in American media, memory, and myths. Indigeneity often remains absent or invisible, however, especially in contemporary political and intellectual discourse about white supremacy, anti-Blackness, and racism in general. In this ambitious new book, Kevin Bruyneel confronts the chronic displacement of Indigeneity in the politics and discourse around race in American political theory and culture, arguing that the ongoing influence of settler-colonialism has undermined efforts to understand Indigenous politics while also hindering conversation around race itself. By reexamining major episodes, texts, writers, and memories of the political past from the seventeenth century to the present, Bruyneel reveals the power of settler memory at work in the persistent disavowal of Indigeneity. He also shows how Indigenous and Black intellectuals have understood ties between racism and white settler memory, even as the settler dimensions of whiteness are frequently erased in our discourse about race, whether in conflicts over Indian mascotry or the white nationalist underpinnings of Trumpism. Envisioning a new political future, Bruyneel challenges readers to refuse settler memory and consider a third reconstruction that can meaningfully link antiracism and anticolonialism.