Indigenous mobility traditions,colonialism, and the anthropocene

ABSTRACT

The anthropocene is often discussed as an era of ‘new’ environmental changes that require unprecedented forms of societal adaptation, one example being climate-induced resettlement. Yet discussions of the anthropocene can also be better contextualized in terms of their featuring certain phenomena as ‘new’ that are really much more longstanding phenomena. For example, many Indigenous peoples have ancient traditions of environmental ‘mobility.’ This essay reviews some of the history of Indigenous philosophies, especially Anishinaabe, of mobility, migration, and resettlement. Often these philosophies focus on fluid and transformative relationships as constituting the fabric of resilient societies. Indigenous traditions of mobility are critically relevant for climate justice. They put into relief how colonial power can operate as a containment strategy that works to curtail mobility. In this way, looking at Indigenous mobility in the anthropocene involves unraveling layers of colonialism where containment has been widely imposed. This claim can be used to signal some of the dangers of centering the causal role of climate change in certain cases societal movement. To further support our claims, the essay concludes with a brief analysis of some of the literature and testimonies on resettlement in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska.     

The effects of climate change on the geography and timing of human mobility

Human mobility over different distances and time scales has long been associated with environmental change, and the idea of climate change is now affecting movement in new ways. In this paper, we discuss three cases from the South Pacific to explain the ways anticipated climate futures are changing mobility in the present. First, we examine village relocation in response to coastal erosion and inundation in Fiji, drawing on our study of the unfolding experience of Narikoso village in Kadavu Province. In contrast to this spatially constrained process of permanent relocation, we examine the spatially extended yet temporally constrained seasonal migrant worker programme that aims to support economic development in the Pacific Islands by providing temporary work visas in Australia and New Zealand. Finally, we examine the likely effects of proposed open labour markets as a means to promote climate change adaptation, through a study of the analogous example of Niuean migration to New Zealand which has resulted in both permanent migration and a slow circulation of people between both countries. Across these examples, we highlight emerging and potentially constructive ways in which climate change is altering the spatio-temporal patterns and rhythms of mobility.     

Indigenous Wellbeing Frameworks in Australia and the Quest for Quantification

There is an emerging global recognition of the inadequacies of conventional socio-economic and demographic data in being able to reflect the relative wellbeing of Indigenous peoples. This paper emerges out of a recent desktop study commissioned by an Australian Indigenous organization who identified a need to enhance local literacies in data collection and interpretation in order to monitor the wellbeing of the Indigenous people within their region, manage governments in respect of their civic responsibilities to this population, and proactively and imaginatively plan for the future of the Indigenous people in their region. In canvassing available data and the growing Indigenous wellbeing literature, it became apparent that conventional statistical collections used to report on the status of populations are governed by a series of assumptions regarding three related concepts: wellbeing; demography; and economic productivity and prosperity. These assumptions have direct implications for how Indigenous peoples are represented to governments and broader society. The paper draws together the existing threads of literature regarding Indigenous wellbeing research to posit a possible broader framework for organising various kinds of Indigenous wellbeing analyses. In doing so, it identifies important shortcomings and deficits in the kinds of data that are available to Indigenous peoples in presenting themselves and their aspirations to governments with. It also opens up a critical analysis of the opportunities and obstacles for Indigenous communities in undertaking such research.     

Forum 4: the environmental privilege of borders in the anthropocene

ABSTRACT

Mobility can indicate a powerful or privileged relationship with one’s environment. The ability to exercise mobility or not (of oneself or others) is an exertion of power that demarcates where particular people belong and under what kind of environmental conditions. This essay focuses on the significance of borders in creating environmental privilege in the Anthropocene. Environmental privilege is accrued through the exercise of economic, political, and cultural power that enables the construction of exclusive environmental amenities such as clean air and water, open space, and safe neighborhoods. For years, environmental justice scholars have revealed the burdens and oppressive conditions associated with environmental inequality, but few studies consider the flipside of that reality. We argue that environmental privileges enjoyed by some rest upon the manipulation of the mobility of others – human and nonhuman. We believe border making will come under greater pressure as the effects of climate change increase, and the volume of resources required to maintain exclusive spaces intensifies. Continued mass migration will bring heightened anxieties about national identity and calls for greater border enforcement, despite the reality that borders – both literal and figurative – consistently fail to alleviate migratory pressures while exacerbating the effects of climate change and environmental injustice. Our research shows that greater ecological instability increases efforts to create privatized places as pristine spaces untouched by global turmoil, thereby reinforcing those social forces that produce environmental injustices in the first place.     

Tropophilia: A Study of People,Place and Lifestyle Travel

This paper explores the changing relations between people and place that are set in motion through mobility. Examining the mobilities of lifestyle travellers, it argues that new relations are sought by this group that undermines traditional assumptions of stability and preservation in the person–place relation. In their stead, lifestyle travellers seek dynamism, change and instability in their engagements with place. This situation suggests that the traditional recognition of the need for a rooted, static and stable set of relations with place – i.e. topophilia – can be supplemented by the love of mobility, change and transformation in the person–place relation – coined tropophilia. The paper raises the important point that a desired connection between ‘people’on one hand and ‘place’ on the other may only occur when their respective paces and trajectories positively coincide.     

Culture,climate change and mobility decisions in Pacific Small Island Developing States

The Pacific Small Island Developing States are often considered on the frontline of climate change due to high levels of exposure to climate-related hazards and limited adaptive capacity to respond. In this context, Pacific Islanders may be displaced, or choose to migrate to escape risk and find more secure livelihoods. On the other hand, Pacific political and community leaders stress that mobility can be a threat to sovereignty and culture and should only be considered as a last resort. This paper adopts a cultural ecology framing to gain a greater understanding of these contested local discourses on climate change and human mobility in Kiribati, Tuvalu and Nauru through the use of the Q method. The results reveal a range of shared subjective understandings of climate change and human mobility which show that reasons for, and perceived outcomes of moving are inextricably linked. These subjective understandings highlight that culture, and in particular how Islanders relate to land and religion can influence decision-making, promoting or hindering mobility. The findings therefore support the need for further engagement with communities to recognise and validate their positions on climate change and human mobility to facilitate the planning and implementation of effective policy.

     

To move or not to move: mobility decision-making in the context of welfare conditionality and paid employment

ABSTRACT

The mobility and agency of the unemployed have rarely been examined together in welfare administration. Mobility research has much to offer the (im)mobility of low-skilled and unemployed workers. The article begins by critically examining dominant public discourse and policy reforms that stigmatise the assumed immobility of the unemployed. Drawing on empirical data from in-depth interviews with people on income support payments in Australia, it then offers a critical view on the mobility decision-making processes of these job-seekers. Building on previous research concerning the politics of mobility, it shows that structural inequalities impact mobility choices, making relocation difficult for many job-seekers. At the same time, it highlights the localised mobility that job search now involves, complicating orthodox associations between mobility and power – as well as assumptions that job-seekers are immobile.     

Indigenous Peoples and Indicators of Well-being: Australian Perspectives on United Nations Global Frameworks

One of the major tasks of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII) following its establishment in 2000 has been to establish statistical profiles of the world’s Indigenous peoples. As part of this broad task, it has recommended that the Millennium Development Goals and other global reporting frameworks should be assessed with a view to incorporating greater recognition of Indigenous concerns, interests, and interpretations of development and well-being. This article reviews the conceptual basis for this recommendation and compares the activities of the UNPFII towards the development of appropriate indicators with the practices of the Australian government in measuring disadvantage among Indigenous peoples in that country. Indigenous peoples’ own perceptions and understandings of well-being are seen to extend beyond and sometimes conflict with conventional reporting frameworks with the latter constructed more around processes of governmentality than Indigenous priorities.     

When People Stay and Things Make Their Way: Airports,Mobilities and Materialities of a Transnational Landscape

Abstract

This article explores different meanings of mobility and place by examining the interweaving of people, things and airports in Guinea-Bissau and Portugal. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in two airports – of departure and arrival of this migratory route – I look at the practices of sending and receiving objects by migrants in Lisbon and their kin in Bissau. The transnational yet grounded setting helps to provide a better understanding of the complexity associated with different forms of mobility – including corporeal, imagined and desired – and their key role in socially and relationally constructing a lived airport space, as well as wider social landscapes. Bringing in evidence from a less-explored setting – a small airport in a West African country – will particularly challenge some of the assumptions that tend to associate mobility with ‘modernity’ and fixity with ‘tradition’. It will show how people in Guinea-Bissau are, as much as migrants abroad, dynamically involved in global practices of movement – materialised in trading and reciprocating objects between two continents – through local performances of mobility that do not necessarily involve corporeal travel across borders.     

Transit justice as spatial justice: learning from activists

ABSTRACT

The provision of mass urban transit is frequently tied to agendas of social justice and equity. Yet there are persistent challenges to locating justice within urban mobility regimes. Drawing on two cases of transit activism – Free Transit Toronto and Black Lives Matter in the San Francisco Bay Area – this paper identifies three limitations to transport justice scholarship and practice, namely the theorization of mobility, space, and justice. These activist struggles demonstrate that justice cannot be adequately defined through an abstract accounting of how harms and benefits are distributed, but also concerns the contextual and conflictual processes of producing space and subjects.     

Rhythm and Mobility in the Inner and Outer Hebrides: Archipelago as Art-Science Research Site

Abstract

This paper explores some of the dimensions of mobility and rhythm emerging from a voyage to the Inner and Outer Hebrides, island collectives on the North West Coast of Scotland. In the summer of 2011, this voyage, combining boat, water and islands, as well as their inhabitants, became a research site for members of Cape Farewell, an organisation that seeks to produce creative responses to climate change. Crew members specifically sought to consider the impact of climate change on island cultures and ecologies, and the sustainability and preservation initiatives deployed here, as well as broader indicators of climate change in the area. Using participant observation of the voyage and interviews, we examine the bodily experienced, rhythmic aspects of the voyage itself; that is, the aesthetics via which the spaces and places of the Inner and Outer Hebrides became known and felt. We consider especially the rhythms of nature and the sea that encompass the motility of materials that are central to a ‘politics of mobility’ that, for Cape Farewell, characterises these islands as frontiers of climate change.     

Including people with intellectual disabilities in the mobilities turn: mobile interviews in Toronto,Canada

ABSTRACT

Geographic research about disability and mobility often foregrounds the built environment as a site of in/exclusion. People with intellectual disabilities (IDs) have been mostly absent from this scholarship. To respond to this gap, we draw from an in-depth set of ‘mobile interviews’ with people with IDs in Toronto, Canada. Using a thematic approach, this paper suggests that more-than-material relations matter to the everyday mobilities and immobilities of people with IDs in urban settings. We aim to centre the participants’ experiences and call for greater inclusion of people with IDs in critical-geographic studies of the disability-mobility nexus. We highlight participants’ regular, planned, and spontaneous mobilities; their attitudes towards their own movement, stillness, and ‘stuck-ness’; and their experiences of staring in public spaces. The contingencies of belonging/exclusion, choice/regimen, and fitting/mis-fitting – as well as the more-than-material, varied, and contextual nature of those tensions – are present in many of the participants’ (im)mobilities in and through the city.     

Coordinated approaches to large-scale movements of people: contributions of the Paris Agreement and the Global Compacts for migration and on refugees

It is not yet clear how climate change will affect the structural constraints and spatial and social complexity that affect population movements in the future. Today, countries of origin, transit, and destination have reached a juncture. The UNFCCC Paris Agreement adds value to decisions these countries face by helping them explore possible scenarios for impacts that include large movements of people that could be associated with a rise in global average temperatures between 1.5 and 2 °C above pre-industrial levels. Climate policy and mainstream migration and refugee policy are developing recommendations by the end of 2018 that, together, will provide new contours for governing human mobility in the twenty-first century. This paper compares work on human mobility under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and how climate change features in the initial drafts of the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM) and the Global Compact on Refugees (GCR). The international community can choose not to include such future considerations, missing opportunities to avert risks of involuntary movements of people as climate change impacts intensify. Alternatively, the international community can help countries to preempt risks arising from governance gaps and climate impacts, incorporate climate and mobility considerations in planning, and establish contingency arrangements for large-scale movements of people. A measure of efficacy in coordinating responses to large-scale movements of people will be the degree to which both state and non-state actors take up the recommendations of the Task Force on Displacement, how the Global Compact for Migration is negotiated, and the degree to which states utilize the Comprehensive Refugee Response Framework as climate and other dynamics unfold in future years.     

Why Do Pacific People with Multiple Ethnic Affiliations Have Poorer Subjective Wellbeing? Negative Ingroup Affect Mediates the Identity Tension Effect

We argue that multi-ethnic affiliation as a member of both the Pacific and majority (European) group creates tension in psychological wellbeing for Pacific peoples of mixed ancestry. Study 1 showed that multi-ethnic Pacific/non-Pacific people were lower in Pacific Familial Wellbeing relative to mono-ethnic Pacific and multi-ethnic Pacific/Pacific people (n = 586). Study 2 replicated this effect in a New Zealand (NZ) national probability sample using a measure of self-esteem (n = 276). Study 2 also modelled the mechanism driving the identity tension effect, and showed that group differences in negative affect toward Pacific peoples fully mediated the effect of ethnic mixed or mono-ethnic group affiliation on self-esteem. This currently affects the one-third of Pacific people who identify as Pacific/non-Pacific in NZ and occurs because multi-ethnic identification promotes the endorsement of negative societal attitudes toward Pacific peoples. Our model indicates that endorsement of such attitudes produces a more negative self-evaluation and generally corrodes subjective wellbeing and family integration. Population projections indicate that this potentially at-risk Pacific/non-Pacific group may increase dramatically in subsequent generations (upwards of 3.3 % of the population by 2026). Implications for the study of Pacific wellbeing, and avenues for applied research targeting this newly-identified emerging social problem are discussed.     

The colonialism of Canada’s Métis health population dynamics: caught between bad data and no data at all

In the last two decades, Canada’s brand of colonial recognition politics has fueled several social and cultural changes that have, in turn, produced startling growths in the “Métis population” in Canada. Demographers and policy makers alike have expressed dubiousness about the extent to which “non-demographic factors” (that is, factors other than fertility and mortality) are fueling this growth, a dubiousness expressed in the growing use of “ethnic mobility” to explain population growth. In this article I explore the historical contexts within which the idea of a single Métis population took hold as a statistical technology, the kinds of social and cultural juxtaposition that making use of a single population masks, and the impact single population estimates have on the ability of Métis nation policy actors to fashion evidence-based policy relevant to the concerns of the Métis nation. While the dynamics and the data perused in this article are specific to Canada, they possess broader resonances with other nation-states grappling with their colonial histories and longstanding Indigenous peoples as these dynamics relate to official data dynamics.     

Claudia Jones speaks to “half the world”: gendering Cold War politics in the Daily Worker, 1950–1953

As feminist scholarship has illustrated, historical resurgences of global migration raise questions about the intersections between war politics, persecution of activists, and its gendered implications. Informed by a new historicist approach, this article seeks to contextualize contemporary scholarly conversations on journalism, migration, and feminist studies by conducting a historical analysis of a bi-weekly column entitled “Half the World.” This column was published in the Daily Worker and was written by little-known Caribbean activist and journalist Claudia Jones. A close reading of all printed columns between 1950 and 1953 illustrate that despite Jones’ tendency to reinforce gendered dichotomies of war discourse, where women represented peace and men violence, she also placed women as the creators of a national and transnational movement against US intervention in Korea. Jones’ story, therefore, contributes to previous feminist histories on the role female journalists and activists have played in shaping the relationship between gender, nation, and war politics.     

Media Action Research Group: toward an antiauthoritarian profeminist media research methodology

The Media Action Research Group (MARG) is an antiauthoritarian, profeminist (antiracist, anticolonial, queer, trans and anti-capitalist) group of activist-researchers both inside and outside the university, studying autonomous social movement media activism in Canada and beyond. In this article we map a taxonomy of activist-research, illustrating how MARG brings together five specific methodologies—activist-led issue-based research, militant participatory ethnography, feminist community research, prefigurative antiauthoritarian feminist participatory action research (PAFPAR), and autonomous media research—to study how women, people of colour, queer and trans people, and Indigenous people in antiauthoritarian or anarchist-leaning social movements are using grassroots media to support and report on these movements. We find that although MARG set out to create an antiauthoritarian research-activist collective, we are restricted in some ways by the intensification of neoliberalism in the university institution. Nonetheless we are able to conduct transgressive research at the intersection between antiauthoritarian activism and the academy, producing three direct and immediate impacts: within social movements, within media activism, and within the university.     

Canada’s forced birth travel: towards feminist indigenous reproductive mobilities

ABSTRACT

The mandatory travel for birth experienced by Indigenous women living in rural and remote areas of Canada is examined using an emergent lens of Indigenous reproductive mobilities. Current evacuation practices are contextualized within the historic and ongoing systems of oppression experienced by Indigenous people in Canada. Indigenous feminist and decolonial theoretical approaches are used to outline one way in which Indigenous women counter settler colonialism to assert sovereignty over their birth experiences – through the resurgence of culturally-based doulas or birth workers. A further contribution of these analyses is the inclusion and centering of the voices and experiences of those previously neglected within this particular body of scholarship, shifting the power relations underpinning reproductive mobilities.     

Māori Cultural Efficacy and Subjective Wellbeing: A Psychological Model and Research Agenda

Māori, the indigenous peoples of New Zealand, experience a range of negative outcomes. Psychological models and interventions aiming to improve outcomes for Māori tend to be founded on a ‘culture-as-cure’ model. This view promotes cultural efficacy as a critical resilience factor that should improve outcomes for Māori. This is a founding premise of initiatives for Indigenous peoples in many nations. However, research modeling the outcomes of increased cultural efficacy for Indigenous peoples, such as Māori, remains limited. We present cross-sectional data modeling the links, and possible causal direction, between Māori cultural efficacy and active identity engagement and levels of (1) satisfaction with personal circumstances and life versus (2) satisfaction with government and the state of the nation more generally (N = 93 Māori). Our data support an opposing outcomes model in which Māori cultural efficacy predicts satisfaction with personal aspects of life, but may simultaneously decrease satisfaction with the nation and methods of governance for Māori peoples. Possible mechanisms governing these opposing effects are discussed.     

Resources, social networks, and collective action frames of college students who join the gay and lesbian rights movement

This article explores the reasons why some college students join the gay and lesbian rights movements. After addressing the frequency of students joining this social movement, the article then considers the contexts and motivations behind such actions. To explore the catalysts to gay and lesbian rights activism, this study utilizes variables from resource, mobilizing, and framing theories of political participation. Using data from 820 heterosexual, lesbian, gay, and bisexual students, we found that economic and educational resources failed to explain participation in gay and lesbian politics. Instead, predictors of gay and lesbian activism were more closely aligned to four key variables: the political orientations of trusted peers, knowing full-fledged activists, an ability to recognize heterosexism, and participants' maintenance of activist identities.