Toward a Sociology of Land: Epistemic Erasure & Indigenous Analytics in Urban Sociology

• In Event: 20810 - Section on Sociology of Indigenous Peoples and Native Nations Roundtable: Land in Indigenous Sociology

Abstract

Recent scholarship has noted the return of “the land question” to the social sciences. Amid calls for sociologists to view land as “complicated and contingent” rather than as fully “settled” (Becher 2023), this paper examines American urban sociology’s inheritance of epistemic erasures around issues pertaining to land. It illuminates how settler-colonial systems of domination, rooted in access to and control over Indigenous land, have been, naturalized and reproduced in the canon of urban sociology. As a result, the subdiscipline continues to elide the work of Indigenous scholars and activists, placing Indigenous knowledge and practice, land claims, and ongoing struggles for sovereignty in the United States outside the realm of inquiry. In drawing attention to these institutionalized erasures, this research hopes to open up new directions for a more complex approach to the study of land, one that centers Indigenous territory as an analytic (Barker 2018), rather than as an object of study, with the ultimate goal of denaturalizing “settler time and space” (Tallbear and Willey 2019). In advancing this approach, it calls for a critical, anti-colonial “sociology of land.”

Author

• Danielle M Jacques, Brandeis University