Prioritising indigenous representations of geopower: the case of Tulita, Northwest Territories, Canada
Why is this work in the frame?
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame — the usual design — would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.
The three-model screen
all 1,000 screened works →All three models called this out of scope.
Ethnography of Indigenous representations of geopower in Tulita; disciplinary reflexivity appears only in the framing, the object is the community.
The thesis studies Indigenous representations of geopower, not research or science as a social system.
Indigenous geopolitics ethnography of Tulita; object is geopower and place, not research systems.
Abstract
Recent calls from progressive, subaltern and postcolonial geopoliticians to move geopolitical scholarship away from its Western ontological bases have argued that more ethnographic studies centred on peripheral and dispossessed geographies need to be undertaken in order to integrate peripheralised agents and agencies in dominant ontologies of geopolitics. This thesis follows these calls. Through empirical data collected during a period of five months of fieldwork undertaken between October 2014 and March 2015, it investigates the ways through which an Indigenous community of the Canadian Arctic, Tulita (located in the Northwest Territories’ Sahtu region) represents geopower. It suggests a semiotic reading of these representations in order to take the agency of other-than/more-than-human beings into account. In doing so, it identifies the ontological bases through which geopolitics can be <em>indigenised</em>. Drawing from Dene animist ontologies, it indeed introduces the notion of a place-contingent <em>speculative geopolitics</em>. Two overarching argumentative lines are pursued. First, this thesis contends that geopower operates through metamorphic refashionings of the material forms of, and signs associated with, space and place. Second, it infers from this that through this transformational process, geopower is able to create the conditions for <em>alienating</em> but also <em>transcending</em> experiences and meanings of place to emerge. It argues that this movement between conflictual and progressive understandings is dialectical in nature. In addition to its conceptual suggestions, this thesis makes three empirical contributions. First, it confirms that settler geopolitical narratives of sovereignty assertion in the North cannot be disentangled from capitalist and industrial political-economic processes. Second, it shows that these processes, and the geopolitical visions that subtend them, are materialised in space via the extension of the urban fabric into Indigenous lands. Third, it demonstrates that by assembling space ontologically in particular ways, geopower establishes (and entrenches) a geopolitical distinction between living/sovereign (or governmentalised) spaces and nonliving/bare spaces (or spaces of nothingness).
Stored with the screening record, where it is evidence for the labels above.
The record
- Venue
- Oxford University Research Archive (ORA) (University of Oxford)
- Topic
- Water Governance and Infrastructure
- Field
- Social Sciences
- Canadian institutions
- —
- Funders
- —
- Keywords
- IndigenousGeographyPolitical scienceEcology
- Has abstract in OpenAlex
- yes