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.
Who is ‘the Settler’? What does this category animate and what does it bely? Despite the vast scholarship on histories of settler colonisation, the complex figure of the settler remains largely taken for granted. This lends itself to a banal decolonial politics that urgently requires critique.
In this essay, I position the logics of settler colonialism and the logics of space exploration dominion over both space on earth, and interplanetary space at the expense of Indigenous peoples. I then look to Indigenous conceptions of space as a potential foil to these colonial logics.
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.
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.