Carceral Geographies of Timber Extraction: Enclosure, Enforcement, and the Reproduction of Settler Sovereignty at Ada’itsx/Fairy Creek
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation examines the 2021 Ada’itsx/Fairy Creek anti-logging blockades on Vancouver Island in British Columbia (B.C.), Canada. It intervenes in dominant narratives afforded to the protests, arguing that the police response was not an aberrant excess of state violence but an ordinary function of extractive forest governance, sustained through legal, spatial, and administrative infrastructures that secure the forestry industry in the province. Using the lenses of carceral geography and abolition feminisms, the project traces how injunction law, management licenses, and the multi-scalar collaboration of state and corporate actors collectively produced the watershed as a carceral geography even before the police arrived to end the protests. Situating Fairy Creek within the contemporary politics of Indigenous “reconciliation,” the study shows how even consultation, consent, and partnership frameworks operate as carceral techniques of governance, translating the neoliberal language of inclusion into punitive force and authorizing punishment to those who refuse participation in the extractive economy. Methodologically, the research integrates site observation, semi-structured interviews with activists, journalists, and lawyers, analysis of Access to Information and Freedom of Information documents, court affidavits, and social-media data. The project illuminates how B.C.’s forest industry depends on diffuse yet continuous forms of punitive governance that extend beyond prisons and police stations into forest landscapes. By re-situating Fairy Creek within the longue durée of colonial enclosure, liberal modernity, and settler-capitalist accumulation, the dissertation demonstrates that industrial forestry in B.C. operates as a carceral formation that enforces Crown sovereignty and corporate interests, instrumentalizes Indigenous jurisdiction, and naturalizes timber extraction as public interest.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".