Transforming Extraction: Reclaiming Oily Futures Through the Nature Park

• In Event: 61.070 - Sheraton Roundtable 10 - Osgoode Ballroom
  In Roundtable Session: 61.070-5 - Reclamation and Refusal: Reimagining Curriculum for Healing and Hope

Abstract

This research is situated in Northern Alberta’s tar sands deposit. The purpose of this paper is to interrogate how the building of ‘reclamation’ areas becomes a way to normalize the destructive effects of oil extraction. Reclaimed areas are former mines that have been filled in and transformed into nature reserves, wildlife parks, and hiking trails. This paper is interested in how the reclaimed site works as a public pedagogy of progressive settler futurity. Justifying the destructive mining practices of the present moment through promises of a green, and just future, reclaimed sites demand to be studied as a site of public curriculum, and one that is deeply entangled within the structures of extractive capitalism and settler colonialism.

Author

• Samantha Spady, University of Toronto