Abstract: A voyage to Mars is no longer a figment of the human imagination. Several agencies are planning to send manned missions to the Red planet as soon as 2025. Two of them are planning to establish bases. Mars One, a non-profit foundation, plans to send manned missions in 2025 (Mars One Foundation, n.d.). NASA (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration) plans to send settlers to Mars in the 2030s (NASA, Journey to Mars, n.d.). Given that the voyage is long and costly, the astronauts must set up camp on Mars. A fully functioning water/wastewater management system is thus necessary for the success of such a mission. The objective of this thesis is to evaluate constraints and propose a design for such a system including the identification of the most suitable location and set of unit processes, and to develop mass balances to justify it. The system proposed involves 70% water recycling, with the use of microwave energy to mine for 30% water from the Martian regolith by sublimation. Wastewater will be segregated, urine, greywater and blackwater, and treated separately. Essential plant nutrients will be extracted from the urine to be used later for agriculture. Water will be extracted from greywater and the resulting brine disposed of safely. Water extracted from urine and greywater will be treated by advanced oxidation to provide drinking water to the habitat. Blackwater is proposed for use in a modified compost process to prepare Martian regolith or other base for eventual agriculture. The proposed design operates without chemical feed or other routine external additives, utilizes the temperature difference between night and day during the Martian sols, and minimizes disturbance of the Martian environment.

Abstract: This paper maps one mode of production within the overall machinery of genocide, appropriation, and subjugation which is colonialism: the settler subject. The settler colonial project is nothing short of a catastrophe, and the subjects who populate Indigenous territory without sanction have been produced through this catastrophe as subjects of colonial conquest, war, and settlement. While bloodshed and bigotry mark the foundational coordinates of North American nation building and settler subjectivities, we here approach catastrophe as a rupture or event that has contemporary potential to open and transforms existing sets of relations. Following Deleuze and Guattari’s insistence that ruptures are opportunities to recreate ourselves in new ethical and aesthetic ways, we map the catastrophic elements of settler colonialism against catastrophe as an event that holds subversive potential. We focus on the settler because its coordinates map each of us within the political, social, and cultural cartography of twenty-first-century North America and ask: How can a transversal mapping of settlement probe aspects of settler subjectivity in order to constitute us as people accountable to colonialism? We therefore probe the affective, relational, and unconscious dimensions of the settler subject in order to develop, following Braidotti, an affirmative and active mode of engaging in the complexities of current relations within settler colonial states.

Abstract: This article examines industrial relations in New Caledonia with a focus on Indigenous labour. Caledonian industrial relations are absent from English speaking industrial relations literature. Therefore, the first objective of this article is to provide a general introduction to the broad industrial relations context including an overview of the political economy; key features of the labour market; labour market regulation and labour issues. The second objective is to provide historical and contemporary insights on the Kanak labour struggle and political (anti-colonial) activism. The research is informed by interviews in 2011 and 2014 and ongoing participant observation among Kanak political forces. Our argument is twofold. First, Caledonian industrial relations are politicised within the politics of reconciliation – the political platform for a so-called common destiny. Second, the politics of reconciliation have been deployed in response to the long-lasting indigenous struggle for sovereignty, with Kanak organised labour at the forefront of this struggle.

Abstract: Noel Pearson has injected an additional, important idea into the debate on changing the Australian Constitution to recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. He has suggested that recognition should provide Indigenous peoples with a voice in the lawmaking process. New text would be inserted into the Constitution creating a body of Indigenous peoples to advise the federal Parliament on the making of laws.

Abstract: Indigenous peoples are constantly approached for research purposes. When researchers call on Indigenous peoples to hand over their knowledge, family histories, stories and images, Indigenous cultural and intellectual rights are at risk. The Kimberley Land Council (‘Council’) has implemented a policy to ensure that research is conducted in accordance with ethical standards so that the rights of Kimberley Aboriginal people are protected from exploitation. It aims to ameliorate the impact of Australian intellectual property laws which fall short of protecting traditional knowledge, thereby giving effect to principles recognised in international law. It mandates that researchers obtain the free, prior informed consent of traditional owners through the Council, duly attribute their assistance and ensure that they partake in any resultant benefits and intellectual property rights. This measure has limited avenues for abuse by providing a contractual safeguard in an area where existing legal frameworks are largely inadequate.

Excerpt: ‘De Tourdonnet’s extended essay on les colonies agricoles alerts us to just this, as it benignly endeavors to situate les colonies agricoles as potential sites for securing imperial frontiers, as instrumental in the imperial dispossession of land, and in the military strategies designed to call on children in the agricultural colonies and on freed penal colony inmates as a frontline of settler colonialism, with the adult ‘colon’ as a reserve army for defense’.

This lecture is available here.

Abstract: This article argues that within the context of settler colonialism, the goal of transitional justice must be decolonisation. Settler colonialism operates according to a logic of elimination that aims to affect the disappearance of Indigenous populations in order to build new societies on expropriated land. This eliminatory logic renders the death of Indigenous peoples “ungrievable”. Therefore, this article proposes a decolonising transitional justice premised on a politics of grief that (1) re-conceptualises Indigenous death as grievable, posing a challenge to the logic of elimination and advancing a “decolonisation of the mind”, and (2) resists a purely affective concept of grief in order to mobilise grief as a political resource to demand transformative structural justice. This article consider deaths at Canada’s Indian Residential Schools as a case study of ungrievability under settler colonialism and the Project of Heart as an illustration of a decolonising form of informal transitional justice.

No abstract available; check the preview here.

Read Rothman-Zecher’s intervention here.

Description: This book extends the discussion of the nature of freedom and what it means for a human to be free. This question has occupied the minds of thinkers since the Enlightenment. However, without exception, every one of these discussions has focused on the character of liberty on Earth.