Citizenship and the production of landscape and knowledge in contemporary Canadian nuclear fuel waste management

Abstract

This article considers the relationship between Aboriginal peoples in Canada and the nuclear industry in the contemporary geography of Canadian

Confronting risk: A case study of Aboriginal peoples' participation in environmental governance of uranium mining, Saskatchewan

“…Most recently, critical geographers have linked the discourse of risk to the sustainability of capitalist political economies, the unloading of harmful effects of accumulation, and governance structures (Baldwin and Stanley ; Stanley ). Drawing from Foucault, Stanley (, ) describes risk as a form of knowledge production that becomes naturalized, normalized, and prioritized in environmental management, and which facilitates the viability of the nuclear industry in Canada. Risk thereby serves to consolidate and support certain political economic power structures at the expense of Aboriginal peoples who are disproportionately exposed to its negative environmental impacts, producing a racialized Canadian geographical landscape (Stanley , ).…”

“…Drawing from Foucault, Stanley (, ) describes risk as a form of knowledge production that becomes naturalized, normalized, and prioritized in environmental management, and which facilitates the viability of the nuclear industry in Canada. Risk thereby serves to consolidate and support certain political economic power structures at the expense of Aboriginal peoples who are disproportionately exposed to its negative environmental impacts, producing a racialized Canadian geographical landscape (Stanley , ). Uranium mining represents an industrial development bounded by the language of risk; unpacking constructions of risk, and the social, economic, and political contexts in which they are situated is paramount to any critical understanding of the power‐laden contours of techno‐scientific information.…”

The Imperial Present: Geography, Imperialism, and its Continued Effects

“…History is replete, of course, with multiple forms of imperial discourse serving to constitutively frame, regulate and enact colonial order and regimes of truth (Mitchell, 1991). In historical and cultural geography in recent years, more sustained engagement with the particularity and relationality of the discourses and practices of colonialism in the colonized worlds themselves has emerged (Lester, 2001;Morrissey, 2003;Raju et al, 2006;Legg, 2007;Stanley, 2008). And this work has taken up, in effect, Jim Duncan's and Denis Cosgrove's earlier call for the complexities of imperialism and colonialism to be "unravelled through localized and historically specific accounts" (1995: 127).…”

“…Contemporary imperialism has been critiqued by geographers in at least four principal ways: first, focus has been given to the persistence of hegemonic cultural registers of difference via imperial discourses of ethnicity, race, religion, gender and sexuality (Gregory, 2004;Blunt, 2005;Clayton, 2009b;Kearns, 2009); secondly, attention has directed to the political economy of continued Western global hegemony and accelerated capitalist accumulation (Harvey, 2003;Jhaveri, 2004;Smith, 2005;Nally 2011); thirdly, critical geopolitical accounts have underlined the abstracted discursive production of military interventionary spaces (and particularly so in the context of the socalled 'war on terror') (Ó Tuathail, 2003;Graham, 2005;Dalby, 2007;Hyndman, 2007); and, finally, geographers have sought to interrogate the multiple practices of interventionism in our contemporary world and their consequent contested forms of securitization and governmentality (Desbiens, 2007;Stanley, 2008;Fluri, 2009;Morrissey, 2011). There has, of course, been much overlap of perspective too, and arguably one of the most important overarching characteristics of contemporary geographical critiques of imperialism is a particular proficiency in contextualizing and theorizing discursive and material productions of space, especially in the complex contexts of postcolonialism, neoliberalism, environmental justice and political violence (Sullivan, 2006;Featherstone, 2008;Cowen, 2009;Watts, 2009).…”

‘Born in an atomic test tube’: landscapes of cyclonic development at Uranium City, Saskatchewan

“…Uranium City's planned development and ultimate reliance on uranium exports found echoes in Canada's other major uranium field, Elliot Lake. As in Saskatchewan, Elliot Lake's career as a uranium producing region was marked by rapid growth, instability, extensive environmental contamination, and problematic relations with neighbouring First Nations (Gray 1982;Saarinen 1986;Mawhiney 1999;Stanley 2008). Uranium country's dependence on its peculiar external market (based as it was on the initially insatiable, yet ultimately fickle American demand) highlight how its economic crises are better understood as 'whiplash declines' (Bradbury 1984b) more akin to cyclonic development than to the 'normal' peaks and troughs of a resource cycle.…”