Settler Colonialism and Scalable Scholarship: Studying Up on The Technopolitics of Indigenous Displacement and Dispossession - I

Abstract

Settler colonialism has been recognized as a persistent kind of logic, discourse, and practice through which foreign settlers displace and dispossess Indigenous peoples. A key task for the scholarship of settler colonialism is dispelling settler origin stories and founding myths by attending to what Audra Simpson calls “scenes of apprehension” (2014:70). This work focuses on the fabrication of fantastic ideas and images that reify structures of categorical and spatial incarceration of Indigenous peoples. Settler colonialism can be thought of as a peculiar epistemological style that emerges from the exploitation of Indigenous knowledge, and the application of such knowledge in order to exploit Indigenous lands and labor, in a process where those impacted most are made responsible for the disaster and poverty wrought by outside developers (West 2012). This panel considers possibilities of studying up in order to critically analyze innovations in settler techniques and technologies of displacement and dispossession. How can scholarship of science and technology studies (STS) nuance studies of settler colonialism? This panel welcomes papers that address “technopolitical regimes” (Hecht 2009) and anthropological interventions in emerging sciences and technologies (Downey and Dumit 1997). The panel will contribute to STS by opening our purview to broader forms of epistemological pluralism (Keller 2002) and attempting to traverse discursive gaps (Fortun 2012). We encourage contributions to what Gary Downey calls “scalable scholarship” (2009)—careful consideration of the possibility of scaling up forms of knowledge that have been marginalized and minoritized by the dominant epistemological paradigm.

Discussant

• Andrea Ballestero, Rice University

Individual Presentations

• Critical Technological Analysis of Infrastructural Colonialism: Learning from 50 Years of James Bay Hydroelectric Projects - Rob Shields, University of Alberta

• Returning to a Natural State: Power, Race, Landscape, and Indigeneity in the Ozarks - Ramey Arlen Moore, Nazarbayev University

• Surveys, Surveillance, and Indigenous Spatial Practice - Meredith A. Palmer, UC Berkeley - Geography

• Sustaining Settler Logic: Transatlantic Narratives in the 19th Century - Solveig Asta Sigurdardottir, English

Session Organizer

• Thomas De Pree, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute