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I’m thinking about the things that you might encounter when taking a walk through a nondescript, “typical” urban environment—an Anywhere, USA-type small city. There’s a portion of paved bike-trail that runs parallel to a now defunct railway, portions of sidewalk running along defunct mid-century
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Describing how the veneer of “opulent” homes and corporate headquarters of Sugar Land, Texas, masked the city’s history as the “Hell-Hole on the Brazos,” historian Andrea Raye Roberts acknowledged how, “in February 2018, the bodies of 95 formerly incarcerate men and women” discovered beneath a school construction site
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Is stone alive, if not in the literal or technical senses of animacy or sentience, then at least in effect or as affect? Stone speaks. What does it say? Something must be done [...]. Haunting is one way in which abusive systems of power make themselves known and their impacts felt
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you learn about a hummingbird species named “flame-throated sunangel” or “sparkling-tailed woodstar” or “purple-crowned fairy” or “shining sunbeam” or “sapphire-spangled emerald” or “amethyst-throated sungem” (these are all real hummingbirds). and you think “all the superlative descriptions of hummingbirds must be exaggerations”. then you learn that
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Here’s a (long) list/summary of scholarly resources from the humanities critiquing hegemonic/colonial temporality and European historiography. Got an anonymous message/ask requesting sources critiquing time. “Temporal sovereignty”. Aboriginal/Indigenous time-keeping. The importance of the “time revolution” in the Victorian era to Euro-American understandings of geology
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A little collection to contemplate together. — The social construction of the high, arid landscapes of the Southwest as “more or less worthless” has been a fundamental component of colonization of the Diné, as well as other southwestern and Great Basin tribes. In fact, the inhabitation of dry, arid landscapes by
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Coloniality, extractivism, and race/racism in institutional and intellectual histories of environmental sciences, land management, etc. Lots of US/Europe since the sixteenth century (like Iberian surveying; “experiential” Caribbean plantations; British botanical gardens; ethnographic exhibitions in France; US “wastelanding” of Dine Navajo lands, etc.). But also including Han/China “retreat
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Displaying the first reconstructed dinosaurs and caricaturizing colonial subjects during a time of rising anti-colonial sentiments, new mass-market media, and scientific professionalization
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Anya Zilberstein’s book Temperate Empire: Making Climate Change in Early America explores more on British fixation on “land improvement.” In these cases (Kirsten Greer’s work on nineteenth-century scientific “field stations” and British “region-making,” implying a “natural” difference between denizens of different regions), professional(ized) institutions are
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How the British Empire's plan to acquire breadfruit to prevent rebellion at Caribbean plantations in the 1780s simultaneously entangled Polynesian people and metropolitan prisoners alike
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(Originally posted elsewhere on 15 April 2025.) Got an anon message; they were interested in hearing more about the concept of tidalectics. I didn’t want to subsume these terms, over-simplify, or mischaracterize the work of these scholars/thinkers. But I do sometimes in post-tagging systems use “tidalectics”
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Seasonally-fluctuating ecosystems, British imposition of fixed properties, and the "legal engineering" of dispossession in Bengal (and how environmental imaginaries are still similarly weaponized)