Thursday, November 17, 2022 – CANCELED DUE to the STRIKE.
3:00 PM
Humanities 1, room 210 + Zoom
On November 17th, join the book launch celebration for Unsettled Borders: The Militarized Science of Surveillance on Sacred Indigenous Land (Duke University Press, 2022) by SJRC faculty affiliate Felicity Amaya Schaeffer, Professor of Feminist Studies at UC Santa Cruz. Shaeffer will be in conversation with Jennifer Gonzalez (History of Art and Visual Culture) and Kat Gutierrez (History).
In Unsettled Borders, Prof. Schaeffer examines the ongoing settler colonial war over the US-Mexico border from the perspective of the Apache, Tohono O’odham, and Maya who fight to protect their sacred land, tracing the scientific and technological development of militarized border surveillance across time and space: from Spanish colonial lookout points in Arizona and Mexico; to the Indian wars when the US cavalry hired Native scouts to track Apache fleeing into Mexico; to the occupation of the Tohono O’odham reservation; and the recent launch of robotic bee swarms. Labeled “Optics Valley,” Arizona builds on a global history of violent dispossession and containment of Native peoples and migrants by branding itself as a profitable hub for surveillance. Schaeffer reverses the logic of borders by turning to indigenous sacred sciences and ancestral land-based practices that are critical to reversing the ecological and social violence of surveillance, extraction, and occupation.
Learn more in this campus news article: New book traces the scientific and technological development of militarized border.
The book is available at: https://www.dukeupress.edu/unsettled-borders.
Felicity Amaya Schaeffer is Professor of the Feminist Studies Department and the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Department as well as an Affiliate Faculty in Latin American and Latinx Studies. Her first book, Love and Empire: Cybermarriage and Citizenship Across the Americas (New York University Press, 2013), follows Internet-mediated marriages across the United States, Colombia, and Mexico alongside neo-colonial fantasies of racial and gendered difference across borders. Her second book, Unsettled Borders: The Militarized Surveillance on Sacred Indigenous Land (Duke University Press, 2021) re-maps the virtual border war alongside the ongoing settler colonial war with Indigenous peoples. She was also one of the editors of the Anthology, Precarity & Belonging: Labor, Migration, and Noncitizenship (Rutgers 2021) and has published articles in a variety of international journals in Mexico, France, and Brazil, and U.S. journals such as Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society; American Quarterly; Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, and Sexualities Journal.
Co-Sponsored by the Feminist Studies Department and the Science & Justice Research Center.