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Rethinking Citizenship in the Anthropocene
This panel explores the relationship between the ecology and membership in the polis. Modern citizenship prescribes a bundle of rights and duties, active participation in self-governance, as well as identity and belonging; it is usually tied to a nation-state. In the Anthropocene, humans and human activity have become major geophysical force with lasting impacts on climate and the environment. These impacts force us to destabilize taken-for-granted divisions not only between societies, but also between “humans” and “non-humans”, as well as between “nature” and “culture” more generally. How then do nature-society interactions in the Anthropocene challenge the meanings and boundaries of citizenship? What can we learn from Indigenous knowledge and scholarship on these issues?
Registration is required, please register here:
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUkcuurqzosHNTFsMwDFGkujqjjQqw4eJ1o
Anticolonial Critiques of the Anthropocene
Jaskiran Dhillon is an anti-colonial scholar and organizer who grew up on Treaty Six Cree Territory in Saskatchewan, Canada. Her work has been published in The Guardian, The Nation, Cultural Anthropology, Feminist Formations, Environment and Society, Social Texts, and Decolonization among other venues. She is the author of Prairie Rising: Indigenous Youth, Decolonization, and the Politics of Intervention (2017) and co-editor of Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement (2019). Jaskiran is an associate professor of global studies and anthropology at The New School and president of The New School's AAUP Chapter.
Indigenous Pathways to Alternative Relational Futures
Michelle Daigle is Mushkegowuk (Cree), a member of Constance Lake First Nation in Treaty 9, and of French ancestry. She is an Assistant Professor in the Centre for Indigenous Studies and the Department of Geography & Planning at the University of Toronto. Her research examines colonial capitalist dispossession and violence on Indigenous lands and bodies, as well as Indigenous practices of resurgence and freedom. Her current research focusses on the renewal of Indigenous relations of care that emerge through Mushkegowuk waterways, and how those generate decolonial possibilities within conditions of extractive violence. Michelle’s writing has been published in Antipode, Environment & Planning D,Political Geography and Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society.
Indigenous Plant Kinship in the Canadian Oil Sands
Janelle Baker (Métis ancestry) is Assistant Professor in Anthropology at Athabasca University in northern Alberta, Canada. Her research is on sakâwiyiniwak (Northern Bush Cree) experiences with wild food contamination in Treaty No. 8 territory, which is an area of extreme extraction of bitumen and forests. In this context, Janelle collaborates with Bigstone Cree Nation environmental monitors using community-based methods and ethnoecology to test moose and water samples, while partnering with microbiologists who use a metagenomics approach to study the composition of microbiomes to map the source of potential harmful contaminants. Janelle is also co-PI with Métis anthropologist Zoe Todd on a project that is restor(y)ing land use governance and bull trout population health in a contested area of the Rocky Mountain foothills in Alberta, Canada. Janelle is the North Americas Representative on the Board of Directors for the International Society of Ethnobiology and a Co-Editor of Ethnobiology Letters, a gold open-access online peer-reviewed journal. She is the winner of the 2019 Canadian Association for Graduate Studies - ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award, Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences category.
Discussant: Christina Shivers is a fifth-year PhD candidate in Urban and Landscape Studies, at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, researching the politics of environmental planning. Her dissertation investigates the rise of market-based environmental policies since the 1970s through researching the influence of ecology and economics on resource extraction in both Canada and the United States. Her work looks to mined-land reclamation programs established in North American and the manner in which scientific and spatial research associated with these programs influenced environmental policy at the national and global scales
Chair: Elke Winter, William Lyon Mackenzie King Visiting Professor of Canadian Studies, Harvard University, and Professor of Sociology, University of Ottawa