Deathscapes of Settler Colonialism : The necro-settlement of Stoney Creek, Ontario, Canada

This is the Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis Group in annals of Association of American Geographers on 23 January 2018, available online https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2017.1406327. The Accepted Manuscript is under embargo until 23 January 2019.This article considers the influence of burials and memorials to colonial soldiers from an earlier era on contemporary social and cultural landscapes in Canada. Through the example of a landscape centered on Smith’s Knoll, a burial ground for war dead from the British-American War of 1812, it explores the process of necro-settlement: the strengthening of settler colonial claims to land based on the development of complex, meaningladen landscapes of dead and memory. This article consists of three parts: The first situates geographical studies of deathscapes alongside theories about settler colonialism through intersecting discourses of land use. The second includes a settler colonial microhistorical geography of Smith’s Knoll and the local deathscape that surrounds it. The third section draws on this case study to reveal new perspectives on the role of burial and memorial in settler colonial place-making and the erasure of Indigenous histories and peoples.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

The International Slave Trade and Slavery in the Pacific Region

G4 - Major Reports and Working Paper

Addressing the Humanitarian and Environmental Consequences of Atmospheric Nuclear Weapon Tests: A Case Study of UK and US Test Programs at Kiritimati (Christmas) and Malden Islands, Republic of Kiribati

Between 1957 and 1962, the UK and USA conducted 33 atmospheric nuclear weapons test detonations at or close to Malden and Kiritimati (Christmas) Islands (total yield 31 megatons), formerly British colonial territories in the central Pacific region, now part of the Republic of Kiribati. Some 40,000 British, Fijian, New Zealand and US civilian and military personnel participated in the test program and 500 i-Kiribati civilians lived on Kiritimati at the time. This article reviews humanitarian and environmental consequences of the UK and US nuclear weapons testing programs in Kiribati, as well as the policy measures that have addressed them. The authors contend that policy interventions to date have not adequately addressed the needs and rights of test survivors, nor ongoing environmental concerns. They argue that the victim assistance and environmental remediation obligations in the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons offer an important new opportunity for addressing the consequences of nuclear detonations in Kiribati, by focusing policy attention and constituting a new field of development assistance

Stigmatising gang narratives, housing, and the social policing of Māori women

It is well established that negative stigmas are used to dehumanise and to limit, restrict, and deny assistance to poor and racially marginalised populations, especially single mothers. While scholars have examined racial social control with regard to gangs, how the stigma of gang affiliation influences access to quality housing has been scantly examined in New Zealand. Employing discourse analysis to examine parliamentary speeches regarding the Organised Crime Bill and Residential Tenancy Amendment Bill (2009–2018), this project explores how gangs are framed in housing-related political discourse. Findings reveal that language used by policymakers constructs gangs as being associated largely with Māori through three main tactics: referencing ‘ethnic’ gangs as the only entity/focus of organised crime; omitting Pākehā/White gangs and white-collar crime; and identifying areas/towns with high Māori populations as in need of targeted social control. Such framing strategies fashioned a criminalising narrative around Māori as gang members and as inherently violent that permeates housing-related political rhetoric used to frame ‘bad’ or ‘undesirable’ tenants enabling policymakers to stigmatise Māori as the ‘criminal other’. This motif carries severe implications with regard to life chances of Māori women, especially as it relates to housing screening practices and the ability to secure social housing

Decolonizing the study of capitalist diversity: epistemic disruption and the varied geographies of coloniality

The nation-as-method approach of Comparative Capitalisms (CC) scholarship has generally taken differential economic growth outcomes between national settings as a core explanandum. The widening of this scholarship beyond its original concern for the Triad nations of Western Europe, North America and Japan draws in countries from across a much greater disparity in economic performance (see also Ebenau, in this volume). This ‘globalizing’ CC work therefore more intently confronts the problematic of how the material conditions of people have improved more rapidly and inclusively in some countries than in others, and it is here that CC scholarship begins to more closely resemble strands of development studies. It is also at this juncture that more statist CC scholars have imported the idea of the developmental state, as the literature surrounding this concept shares the interest of the capitalist diversity field in examining relations between degrees of state-strategic coordination and economic performance (see Storz et al., 2013, p. 219; Gaitán and Boschi, in this volume). But in the pursuit of an institutional formula for wealth creation, this CC work and cognate scholarship on the developmental state overlook the prospect that poverty creation (on which see Blaney and Inayatullah, 2010, p. 2) might actually be constitutive of such a process

Colonialism and the Peel Island Lazaret: changing the world one story at a time

Archaeology tells interpretive stories about the past. My experiences as a migrant to Australia and my working-class background have created the archaeologist that I am and the stories of the past that I choose to tell. Here I reflect on my own childhood and early adulthood, and their impacts on my archaeological practice and my affinity with Aboriginal political ambitions. An investigation of the embedded and institutionalized racism experienced by Aboriginal inmates of the Peel Island Lazaret is used as a case study to express my desire to change the world one story at a time