Undoing settler imaginaries: (Re)imagining digital knowledge politics

Abstract

Geography as a discipline is entangled in settler colonial regimes that continue to shape geographic practice and the boundaries of geographical knowledge. Digital technologies play an instrumental role in shaping the view of geography and sociospatial relations. This paper traces the construction of the settler imaginary in geographic thought through scholarship in digital geographies and anticolonialism. By bridging anticolonial scholarship in digital geographies, this paper contributes to debates on anticolonial and decolonial refusal politics and its role in realizing reciprocal land-life relations. The (re)imagining of digital knowledge politics begins with accountable digital geographic practices on the terms of Indigenous peoples’.

Climate Change and Property Experiments in Appalachia

“…Returning to the vista on Huckleberry Knob, examples abound of alternative geographical imaginaries and of how anticolonial movements subvert colonial technologies for their own use (Rivera 2023, p. 5). What can we learn from such challenges to liberal forms of recognition and efforts to upset capitalist forms of life?…”

Death world economy: Race, meat-processing plants, and COVID-19

“…From medical investigations to literary representation, and even in legal cases, necro frameworks illuminate the politics of death in a capitalist society. More recent theorizations of death include connections to the modern capitalist systems, sometimes called “necro-capitalism,” which highlight how capitalist structures relegate life to death (Banaerjee, 2006) in settler colonial logics (Rivera 2023). Even in corporations, criminal actions that determine life and death are theorized as the work of “necro-corporations” (Alcadipani and Medeiros, 2017).…”

Indigenous peoples, digital leisure, and popular culture

“…Even while settler imaginaries reproduce themselves “through the institutionalization and disciplining of knowledge practices to perform, mediate, and maintain colonial order” (Rivera, 2023, p. 299) including through mass media, digital technologies, and the capitalist system, Indigenous peoples still cultivate pleasure, meaning, humour, resistance, and creativity everyday within and around this very same colonial system “often by subverting and rearranging it to suit” (Harris & Carlson, 2016, p. 459). The significance and relevance of AlterNative ’s 2016 special issue can still be felt as a Black and Indigenous academic intervention contrary to settler knowledge about Indigenous cultures (Harris & Carlson, 2016).…”