Geography

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://digital.lib.washington.edu/handle/1773/4924

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Theorizing the Political Potential of Care through Digital Spaces of Trans Belonging
(2025-10-02) Davenport, Theodore; Knopp, Lawrence
Over the past three decades, the popularization of the Internet has reshaped the spatialities of transgender intracommunity care practices. As the personal computer became a commonplace fixture in the home, gender-diverse people were increasingly able to access trans communities, information about trans life, and spaces encouraging gender play. In recent years, however, anti-trans actors have instigated a moral panic by claiming that online trans spaces are "turning" people (especially children) transgender, ignoring histories of both offline and online trans placemaking and caring practices. This qualitative, mixed-methods dissertation explores how trans people in the US have engaged in online community care practices since the Internet became publicly available in the mid-1990s. Drawing from archival materials and interviews, I evaluate how trans people have enacted care practices in digital spaces throughout the history of the Internet and how such digital care practices might provide political potential for trans justice. Using a feminist methodological approach and drawing from literature on digital geographies, care ethics, and critical trans politics, I ask, how are transgender digital worlds and the material conditions of everyday trans life are intertwined? My findings challenge the popular understanding of online trans spaces as uniform spaces with similar politics and care practices. I explore what makes a space—particularly an online space—trans and discuss the spatial characteristics that were most prominent in my interviews and archival materials. In the archives, I find that early Internet users—who tended to be white, middle-upper class, and in governmental or academic jobs—played a large role in popularizing "transgender" as an umbrella term that, contradictorily, had both the potential for new cross-gender political coalitions and imbuing respectability politics into trans narratives. Although the "trans Internet" is often conceptualized as a monolith, my interviews uncover that trans people of color and disabled trans people often seek out online spaces that explicitly center antiracism and disability justice after experiencing microaggressions on mainstream online trans spaces. Many online trans spaces are suffering under the current era of platform capitalism-driven Internet, the extractive nature of which excludes trans spaces except as cultural commodities. Across interviews and archives, I find that trans-centered storytelling—both fictional and nonfictional—is a major way trans people explore their gender identities and build communities. Finally, I evaluate the role of algorithms in reinscribing transmisogynistic narratives around sexuality; positioning trans and gender diverse people as predators; and automating the censorship of online trans voices. This work emphasizes the necessity of trans care while resisting characterizing the Internet as a panacea for trans injustice, situating findings within the Internet's origins as a military technology and its continued usage in perpetuating colonialism, racism, ableism, transphobia, and other forms of injustice.
Mobility and Making ‘Tin Lanh’ in America
(2025-08-01) Ha, Daniel; McElroy, Erin
This thesis traces the dynamics of community and place-making for Vietnamese Protestants, and introduces a different interpretive framework for this using the language of mobility. It argues that mobility has been central to the placemaking practices of Vietnamese American Protestants from the arrival of the first border crossers in 1975 to now. This research combines archival as well as ethnographic research methods with the aim of exploring what types of mobility are important for Vietnamese Protestants in different contexts, scales, and times. For Vietnamese Protestant refugees coming to the United States in the wake of the Fall of Saigon in April 1975, the debates over the shape and purposes of their churches formed the discursive landscape in which the connections and entanglement between refugee politics of gratitude and indebtedness, Christian rhetorics of spiritual brotherhood, and articulations of exilic belonging and desires of an eventual return to the Vietnamese homeland, were revealed. In this context, the major type of mobility that had to be confronted was that of refugee passage, but present day border crossings from Vietnam to the United States carry a different set of political and spiritual impositions. These border crossings instead allow us to see the ways that mobility can become linked to ideas of modernity not through notions of material development or progress, but as the first step, an alternative to conversion, in which the act of migrating is the precondition through which one gains access towards the possibility of individual self-transformation through spirituality. Finally, drawing from archival material on the Vietnamese Boat People Evangelical Church that existed in Hong Kong, this thesis argues that mobility works not just by revealing or encoding narratives about or into places and bodies, but demonstrates the ways in which spaces of worship needed to confront the mobilities that brought people to the church as well as the border crossings that were still to come.
Growing the Insurgent Commons: Counter-mapping Alternative, Subversive, and Insurgent Food Networks in Seattle
(2025-08-01) Sanchez-Foster, Isabel L; McElroy, Erin
This thesis builds upon the contemporary growth of radical commoning and alternative food network (AFN) praxis to analyze the prefigurative potentials of Seattle’s food-based commoning networks. Historical analysis demonstrates that enclosing the commons from the 15th century onwards – specifically the privatization of food resources – is fundamental in the economic and military expansion of capitalism throughout the world. Additionally, scholars emphasize the importance of commoning – the development of communal relations – in combatting land privatization through the present. However, AFN literature does not often engage with commoning studies, despite the clear tactical and theoretical overlaps. Furthermore, both fields systemically lack a political and materially based framework for analyzing the effectiveness of their tactics. Using militant research and countermapping methods, I mend these disconnections in AFN and commoning literature by applying lessons from past radical commoning practices to contemporary food-based projects in Seattle. By mapping all above-ground groups involved in free food circulation, I visualize the collective capacity of Seattle’s free food networks and provide Seattle residents with updated information about these services. To promote deeper engagement with revolutionary theories – such as the shadow state and dual power – I argue for the distinguishment of insurgent praxis from the predominant neoliberal frameworks. This thesis argues that insurgent commoning is the primary tool through which we can fortify our communities against climate and capitalist collapse. Access the interactive "Seattle Free Food Networks" map at: https://clausa.app.carto.com/map/9b203d3b-cf1f-40b9-9327-42708442e5fa
Artificial Divides: Global AI Access Disparities and Constructions of New Digital Realities
(2024-10-16) Peng, Lizhi; Zhao, Bo
Following the wake of ChatGPT’s release in late 2022, we have witnessed the launch of an “arms race” of generative AI technology as large language models (LLMs) entered a phase of rapid development and advancement, with promises of revolutionary transformations of work spaces and everyday life from major tech companies. As contestants and major power players like OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and Meta enter the game, many ethical concerns have been raised regarding whether this technology will truly be the beginning of the next technological revolution, and if so, whether it will be beneficial to human society as a whole or only serve in the interest of a few. At the same time. Many AI scientists, researchers and industry leaders have come forth with claims that how we handle this new technology will be critical to the wellbeing or even survival of humanity in the future(citation). As the industry chases after the promise of the sparks of artificial general intelligence (AGI), that one day truly autonomous super AIs capable of outsmarting the human brain in generalized tasks can be achieved, discussions of AI alignment, the checks and balances that will keep AI acting and behaving according to human values and principles continue. Yet, even as we enthuse over the potential transformations this technology brings to our society, it is important to point out that true alignment requires the input from people across all backgrounds and walks of life. It would be concerning to leave the definition of “human values” in the hands of a few leaders behind closed doors. This thesis consists of papers exploring the potential ethical risks and concerns AI technology raises regarding accessibility and equity issues both in the AI industry and in the broader society centering two major questions: “who has access to AIs?” and “who builds the AIs?”. In the first paper, I will examine current tangible and intangible barriers to accessing AI subscriptions, and how performance of an AI differs across linguistic and geographical contexts, as a way of painting a bigger picture of the network of unfair representations behind the training, deployment and access of commercial AIs. In the second paper, I build on top of the previous theoretical foundations to connect current discussions in AI training and alignment ethics with interdisciplinary views and critiques on technology and society. I propose a framework that conceptualizes large language models as models of our society, interpreting AI as the reproduction and embodiment of the intricate power dynamics and inequalities fueled by social discourses and media representation. In this model I refer to as “layers of realities”, I explore the complex relationship between the physical world, the internet and digital media, and the world of large language models, in order to highlight the urgency to not see AI biases as a standalone issue within the industry, but a sign that alerts us to address issues in the physical and digital world such as unequal technology access and unfair mis/under-representation of marginalized identities in this increasingly digitized world.
Understanding dynamic human emotions toward geographic environments: An integration of EEG into GIScience
(2024-10-16) Feng, Jiaxin; Zhao, Bo
Conventional GIScience in favor of objectivity and rationality has focused mainly on locations in the physical environment while falling short of dealing with mental space and human perceptions, feelings, and emotions. Emotional factors are minimized in the majority of GIS algorithms as such factors are viewed as obstructive to spatial analysis. Nevertheless, emotion about place, or sense of place, is fundamental in people’s everyday lives as an essential aspect of geospatial experiences. They affect humans’ decision-making, spatial behaviors, and mental well-being. Nowadays, it is encouraged to humanize modern GIS that has been predominantly technocentric and has overlooked human livelihoods. This dissertation investigates dynamic human emotions toward geographic environments using different approaches. Chapter 2 delves into the conceptualization of emotion in GIS studies and summarizes three frequently used approaches to measure emotions, namely, interpretive, psychophysiological, and data-driven approaches. A mixed methods approach is further suggested to holistically capture the richness and complexity of human emotions. The potential of a new sensing approach has been discussed, which quantitatively studies human emotions toward geographic environments by integrating EEG (electroencephalogram)-based emotions into GIScience. As a non-invasive and wireless brain recording technique, EEG collects signals from the surface of the human brain, where emotions are processed by brain structures. Through the analysis of EEG signals, instantaneous, continuous, and bodily emotional responses can be inferred. Following this approach, Chapter 3 dives into both neurophysiological responses and subjective feelings of individuals toward geographic environments, investigating evidence from EEG recordings, short descriptions of emotions, emotional ratings, and personal accounts of feelings using mixed methods. It applies an EEG headset to collect the brainwaves of participants who watched a range of first-person perspective videos presenting various geographic environments, develops machine learning algorithms to infer emotions from brainwaves, and compares them with subjective explanations of emotions. Using the same experiment data, Chapter 4 examines how the dynamic senses of place of individuals can be explained by both perceived geographic environments and demographics using deep learning. Place semantics are extracted from first-person perspective video frames using the state-of-the-art semantic segmentation architecture. Gradient boosting models are built to explain emotions per participant per video frame using participant demographics and place semantics that indicate perceived geographic environments. Overall, this dissertation encourages closer attention to psychophysiological and subjective experiences of place and space, and offers insights into synthesizing human subjective and personal experiences into GIS applications and services.
Leisures of Responsibility: Spatializing Care and Wellness in Martial Arts Practice
(2024-09-09) Masilela, Ayanda Martha; Brown, Michael P
The term “martial arts” encompasses a broad spectrum of techniques, philosophies, and training regimes. These movement practices function alongside discourses of health and reflections on cultural significance. While some disciplines, such as Taijiquan, easily fit into understandings of healthful practice, meanings of health in higher-risk practices can be more difficult to decipher. This project explores the seemingly contradictory experience of hard physical contact and health, and the importance of space in setting the stage for the safe exploration of normatively aversive experiences with pain.
Convergence: Building Towards Fluid Futurities
(2024-09-09) Ahmed, Sai; Freshour, Carrie; Ybarra, Megan
Since the 1974 Boldt Decision, Native Nations in Coast Salish territories have collaborated alongside state and federal governments for co-management over watersheds and coasts. Over this time, the fishing industry has rapidly expanded, from commodifying fishing rights and access to the territorialization and allocation of miles of the ocean to farmed fish production, putting wild Pacific Salmon—an ecological and cultural keystone species in Coast Salish territories—in danger. This paper explores the tensions navigated and solidarities formed between Black, Indigenous, and other people of color on Coast Salish territories in the struggle to protect Salmon and resist the ongoing violence of racial capitalism and settler colonialism that is exerted on their communities, and more- than-human kin. This research combines a historical overview of Seattle, as a crossing-over place for people and Salmon on Coast Salish territories, and ethnographic methods, to explore ways in which Black, Indigenous, and other people of color build towards fluid futures, centering Indigenous ontologies, relationality, food-sovereignty and the long-term restoration of Salmon watersheds and the ocean.
Caring in Crises: Spatializing Infrastructures of Care through Tenant Protections
(2023-09-27) Thompson, Samantha P; Elwood-Faustino, Sarah
Care is the provision of practical or emotional support and is increasingly recognized as a crucial component of our everyday lives and societies. As pervasive housing crises exist in most global North cities today, developing an understanding of how housing too can provide care or be an ‘infrastructure of care’ in unequal housing systems is increasingly urgent. Yet, there remain gaps in our understanding of housing as care, particularly in the structural entanglement of housing inequalities with settler colonial racial capitalism and cisheteropatriarchy. Accounting for the impacts of these intersecting power structures, this dissertation explores how tenants’ experiences of housing crises are shaped by local state care infrastructures. The dissertation focuses on municipal tenant protections as an impactful form of local state care infrastructure. Engaging data gathered through feminist digital ethnography, including participant observation, autoethnography, semi-structured interviews, and archival methods, the dissertation conducts a relational comparison of Seattle, WA and Vancouver, BC in 1969-1990 and 2019-2023. A relational comparison of two urban empirical sites allows for a developed understanding of the ways that a place is shaped by, and connected to, its relationship to another. The dissertation begins with an examination of the forms and capacities of local state care infrastructure, in order to assess housing as an infrastructure of care. It then considers how care gaps left by local state infrastructure are addressed through the care work of tenants. It argues that local state care infrastructure plays an important role in tenants’ experiences of housing crises, but the care capacity of the infrastructure is limited by the state’s embeddedness in racial capitalism and settler colonialism. The care that is available to tenants through local state infrastructure relies on the care labour of tenants in order to function. The nature of this labour is shaped by cisheteropatriarchal structures that exacerbate the violence tenants’ experience in housing crises. The attention to tenants’ practices and politics of care is then turned to contemporary contexts, where tenants rely on self-care and collective tenant care in order to navigate their survival in housing crises, as a result of the failure of local state housing care infrastructure. To move beyond this cycle, tenants develop housing care imaginaries that illustrate possibilities for housing futures where a range of care needs are met. The dissertation argues that employing a radical care framework, which recognizes necessary care work that enables survival in precarious worlds, helps us to account for a range of housing futures that move beyond the normalization of liberal economic logics which limit what solutions to housing crises are currently understood as possible. The dissertation is structured to offer considerations of urban tenants’ experiences of care and housing in crises through historical, contemporary, and futures contexts.
Herbs, Soil, and Health: Beyond Human and Planetary Medicine
(2023-09-27) Espinosa Guarderas, Juan Mateo; Bergmann, Luke
This dissertation explores the relationships between the generation of medical knowledge and its connections to herbs, soil, and the study of living organisms. The dissertation explores the origins of medical knowledge by tracing the history and significance of medical concepts such as ‘adaptability,’ ‘autopoiesis,’ ‘milieu,’ and the ‘normal’ in physiology. An important direction and intended contribution are the discussions of methodological approaches to studying living beings in their milieu, guided by a discussion of vitalist and mechanistic approaches to understanding life processes, and a proposal to embark on a specific method of inquiry equipped with the possibility of such intellectual purpose: intuition. Health, conceptually, is also analyzed from a contemporary political context and the implications of ecological crisis on how health is conceived and practiced upon, on a more-than-human, planetary scale. Informed by the study of medical philosophy, the dissertation shifts into an application of intuitive methods and a vitalist conceptualization of the living and its relation to its milieu, to explore soils, agriculture, and animal husbandry. Through a series of explorations of methods learned towards soil health, we propose that the idea of working towards planetary health, humans included, can be achieved optimistically by working for the ground, for soil and its life-giving potential, in what can be conceived as a medical agriculture that can set the planet on the path towards ever greater abundance of life, and health.
Modeling the social and political contexts of United States health protective interventions during the COVID-19 pandemic
(2023-08-14) Sutton, Aja Marie; Mayer, Jonathan D
The virus SARS-CoV-2 (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2) and its disease COVID-19 (Coronavirus Disease 2019) have highlighted the direct relationship between geography and COVID-19; it is a virus that is fostered by the spaces and places in which we live and by the ways in which we occupy and navigate our landscapes. In the early period of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was evident there significant relationships between willingness to adopt preventative health measures and behaviors with prosocial values, the social amplification of risk through friends and family, personal experiences of risk and trust associated with health messaging, and personal individualistic tendencies. Chapter 1 uses data from American Community Survey 2019 5-year estimates and The Behavioral Change COVID-19 (BCC19) Survey to consider the role of voting for Donald Trump in mask-wearing choice during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Accounting for sociodemographic and ecological characteristics, trust in government, approximate time and variation in relative space, and the role of Trump support as an identity characteristic, it finds that voting for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election had the greatest effect magnitude and negative relationship with indoor public mask-wearing of any demographic factor or choice measured in the survey, as well as a lower perception of personal risk from the pandemic, and consequently a lower or negative perception of the utility of indoor public mask-wearing. Chapter 2 considers the performance of Bayesian multilevel regression and poststratification with and without a spatial specification in producing small area estimates of first-dose vaccination in the state of California in June 2021 using the The COVID-19 Trends and Impact Survey. A comparison of county-level estimates indicate that inclusion of a spatial smoothing term yields improved results relative to CDC baseline estimates. Chapter 3 builds from findings in Chapter 1 and motivated reasoning theory framework. It uses the BCC19 Survey to identify the social context of Trump supporters’ attitudes and beliefs within three areas: political and social engagement; trust of specific information sources to provide reliable information about COVID-19; and geographic proximity of contacts and relative local community social cohesion. It finds that the subset of the population united through Trump support were generally White, non-Hispanic people over the age of 45 years, with high school educations; identified as Christian (most often Evangelical or Protestant); lived in suburban or rural environments; existed within diffuse, county-level friends-driven social networks; felt strongly about the optics of attending political rallies over participating in demonstrations or protests; and preferred domestic public health advice to international. It also suggests that the motivated reasoning pathways associated with Trump support are likely to persist as evidenced with the increasing popularity of other populist politicians.
Balancing the quantitative/qualitative divide: A rhythmanalytic review of Seattle’s Black-Owned Restaurants’ experience during the COVID-19 pandemic (2020-2021)
(2023-08-14) Bao, Xiaoqi; Zhao, Bo
The unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic has prompted a surge in quantitative research aimed at comprehending its causes, progression, and spatial-temporal disparities. Nevertheless, there has been significant and ongoing critiques of quantitative approaches in geography since approximately 1970, with prolonged debates regarding the quantitative/qualitative divide lasting for decades. Echoing the appeals for non-binary mediations for this epistemological dichotomy, this Master’s project proposes a new mixed-method approach, which applies rhythmanalysis, a traditionally qualitative analytical framework, on burgeoning big geospatial data. This new approach is comprised of four sequential steps, including 1) choosing the body, 2) identifying the rhythms, 3) measuring the rhythms, and 4) analyzing the polyrhythmia. To demonstrate its utility and feasibility, I designed an empirical study to understand Seattle’s Black-owned restaurants’ experience during the pandemic (2020-2021). The case study proved the viability of the original method and generated a more situated understanding of Seattle’s Black-owned restaurants’ situation during the first two years of the pandemic. This project makes significant theoretical and practical contributions to the discipline and society by introducing a new methodological orientation for more humanistic geographic investigations. Lastly, it is worth noting that, part of the arguments of this thesis is built upon the paper that I co-authored and made significant contributions to in the empirical study and discussion. The paper titled “Black Businesses Matter: A Longitudinal Study of Black-Owned Restaurants in the COVID-19 Pandemic Using Geospatial Big Data” was published in 2022 in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers.
Collapsing moments: confronting anti-Black logics in the Philippines' colonial archive
(2023-08-14) Vale, Hanover; Freshour, Carrie
This thesis draws from Black geographies and Black studies to re-examine the Philippines’ colonial archives. I focus on the US Imperial perspective at the turn of the 20th century, and devote particular attention to how the US articulates Blackness in the Philippines through the caricature of the sambo, through racial pseudo-science, and through racializing the Philippines in larger currents of Pacific racialization. This project uses archival methodologies alongside discourse analysis to trace anti-Blackness from the archive to discuss Dean Worcester’s text Slavery and Peonage (1913) and the carceral logics of the US Forestry Bureau and the Philippines’ Public Lands Act of 1902. Foregrounding this project is the persistence of the racial organization of the plantation as a force extending beyond the bounds of its geographies and into the political forest. Using the analytic of anti-Blackness as a primary structuring force, I trace archival moments that together address US logics of racial capitalism in the Philippines that have previously been lesser attended to by Filipinx studies and Black geographies
An Elusive Consensus: Mental Health and Psychosocial Support in Disasters and Emergencies Since 1980
(2023-08-14) Wilson, Margaret; Brown, Michael
Mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS) has become an increasingly common form of humanitarian aid in disasters and emergencies, particularly since the publication of the influential IASC Guidelines in 2007. Despite increased acceptance of and attention to MHPSS within the humanitarian field, fundamental questions about the logic and practice of MHPSS remain unresolved. Drawing from and contributing to scholarly literature in feminist political geography and science and technology studies, this dissertation investigates the policies, politics, and practice of MHPSS in emergencies through qualitative interviewing, archival research, and content and discourse analysis of standards and guidelines for this form of humanitarian aid. Previous scholarship critiquing the inclusion of mental health and psychosocial interventions within emergency humanitarian response does not adequately account for the central divisions and debates that have characterized the MHPSS field for decades—or for the ontological and epistemological multiplicity underlying these debates. In contrast with framings of MHPSS as a field that is characterized by professional consensus, I argue that key questions about MHPSS as a domain of expert knowledge and practice remain unresolved. This lack of consensus stems, in part, from a tension between conceptualizations of MHPSS as a standardized, technical practice, and as an intimate and humane form of care. This research adds depth and nuance to critical scholarship on MHPSS in humanitarian emergencies by analyzing three interrelated areas of dissensus within the humanitarian field: trauma and PTSD as objects of expert intervention in disasters and emergencies; the role of medicalized mental health care in humanitarian emergency response; and systems of classification that are foundational to the practice of MHPSS in emergencies.
Mapping The Terms of Freedom & The Ongoing Refusal of Settler Imaginaries
(2023-08-14) Rivera, Isaac; Elwood, Sarah
Originating in Denver, Colorado in 1907 and exported as a national holiday in 1934, Columbus Day enacts the logic and institutionalization of conquest. Yet despite the seemingly totalizing imaginary of ongoing settler colonialism, Indigenous peoples continue to resist erasure. My dissertation, Mapping the Terms of Freedom & The Ongoing Refusal of Settler Imaginaries, traces the making and unmaking of settler imaginaries in Denver and the ways in which the city’s Indigenous communities choose to represent their stories of resistance to the world. I connect the way institutions of knowledge maintain settler imaginaries in place through the entanglement of visual and digital knowledge practices in settler colonialism. Using ethnographic, archival, and participatory research methods, I trace self-determined Indigenous representations of strength through the community-curated (Re)Mapping Native Denver art exhibit that maps Indigenous geographies and dismantles the logics implicated in the settler imaginary. Held at Denver University (DU) in 2021, the (Re)Mapping Native Art Exhibit stood as a site of public facing education, demonstrating the liberatory power of retelling geo-history on the terms of Indigenous peoples.
Relational Conservation Territories: Racialized Property Regimes, Negotiated Rights and Environmental Management in the Selva Misionera
(2023-04-17) Shoffner, Elizabeth; Lawson, Victoria
This dissertation examines the intersection of the often-unrealized rights of Latin America’s ‘territorial turn’ and the shifting political economy of Misiones, Argentina, as the selva misionera subtropical forest is revalorized as an object of conservation. I analyze the making of conservation territories through an ethnography of ‘Lote 8’, a nearly 4000-hectare lot in the YabotÃ Biosphere Reserve, purchased for conservation and titled to three Mbya Guarani communities following over a decade of struggle for their land. First, I explore how Lote 8 is produced and stabilized as a discursive object through a multi-scalar network of actors, institutions, and infrastructures, which extract political, social and material value through its representation. Then, I trace the relationship among property, indigeneity and the selva though the creation of the YabotÃ Biosphere Reserve in the early 1990s, the dispute over Lote 8 between the Mbya Guarani and a logging company at the turn of the century, and the negotiated conservation land purchase and titling agreement. I show how claims to ‘conservation citizenship’ produce new spaces to contest histories of racialized dispossession and negotiate rights otherwise foreclosed through legal avenues, as conservation networks become an audience for the enunciation of rights claims and a non-state arbiter of the recognition of Indigenous communities. Problematically however, where rights claims made to the state require legibility of land as Indigenous territory, recognition by conservation actors requires that Indigenous communities demonstrate their legitimacy as conservation subjects, making ‘negotiated rights’ contingent, imbricated with the political economy of conservation and always susceptible to being undermined. Finally, I examine the effects of (re)producing the selva misionera as an object of environmental management in the YabotÃ Biosphere Reserve and its area of influence. I show how provincial parks are socially produced through the embodied labor of park rangers, which extends through (b)ordering practices for managing the overlapping borderlands of the YabotÃ Biosphere Reserve and the national border with Brazil. I argue that accessing land titles through conservation entangles Indigenous rights with environmental management as it operates as a mode of extending settler colonial territorial control through the everyday enactment of conservation territories.
Parallel Disentanglement: Treaty-based Navigation of Settler-Indigenous Governance Politics
(2022-09-23) Wolkin, Kenneth; Ybarra, Megan
In this thesis, I outline a treaty-based interpretive and methodological framework for tending to settler-Indigenous governance relationships, while theorizing pathways towards more robust forms of settler solidarity and relational accountability to Indigenous legal geographies. I begin by assessing the incongruity between the U.S. Department of the Interior and Bureau of Indian Affairs’ recognition of a configuration of Gayogo̱hÃ³꞉nǫˀ (Cayuga Nation) leadership that differs from the Nation’s leadership as recognized by the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, of which the Gayogo̱hÃ³꞉nǫˀ are a constituent Nation. Analyzing an archive of U.S. federal executive and judicial decisions pertaining to Gayogo̱hÃ³꞉nǫˀ law, governance processes, and leadership configuration, I detail the U.S. settler state’s attempted apprehension of Gayogo̱hÃ³꞉nǫˀgovernance and jurisdiction, enabled by its predicate failure to heed the governance authority of Gayogo̱hÃ³꞉nǫˀ Clan Mothers, and the Great Law of Peace from which their authority flows. Theorizing from ongoing solidarity efforts, grounded in cross-national relationships of care that embody the foundational principles of the Two Row Wampum Treaty, I call for settlers to more actively attune and attend to the quality of settler-Indigenous governance relationships, inviting settlers into what I term a more dynamic inhabitance of settler subjectivity. I suggest that future research take a more capacious approach to theorizing and tending governance and treaty relationships, as this may yet yield additional methodological insight for building more engaged forms of settler accountability to ongoing and future geographies of Indigenous governance.
The Cracking of Concrete Jungles: Practicing Indigenous Kinship in Diaspora
(2022-09-23) Carrasco, Wesley; Ybarra, Megan
In this thesis, I ask what does it mean to be an Indigenous person, but not to these lands? How might a Native Lenca community displaced from Honduras make intentional kinship with the Paayme Paxaayt (West River in Tongva language) also known as the Los Angeles River? While popular understandings of immigration center on labor and Latinidades, many immigrants are Indigenous and bring with them different languages and relationships to land (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2014; Stephen, 2007). Understanding mobility as a strategy for survival is tied to Indigenous ontologies of kinships and lessons learned from nonhuman worlds like lands and rivers. This relational understanding recenters land as pedagogy where nonhuman beings like rivers serve as teachers by working with Indigenous peoples against the settler-state. Indigenous peoples in diaspora then employ migration as a form of mobility that highlights sovereignty over their own bodies by refusing settler rule through the crossing of multitudes of borders. Urban geographies like Los Angeles serve as settler borders by uplifting white supremacy through geographical imaginaries and discourses that deny Indigenous presence within urban cities undermining Indigenous futurities through the encasing of land within concrete.Through migration, Los Angeles has become a hub for Indigenous peoples in diaspora who challenge settler imaginaries by focusing on their rights to self-determination and transforming urban spaces through intentional nonhuman kinships. They intentionally form new commitments to new lands by engaging in new alliances with other Indigenous communities and nonhuman worlds. Through storytelling I’ll explain how Indigenous peoples in diaspora from Abia Yala carry land within themselves, transforming public spaces, front/backyards, balconies, and alleys into community spaces of care that chip away and crack the concrete bringing forth Indigenous existence and futurity within urban spaces through kinships.
Killing for coexistence: the bio- and necro-political ecology of wolf conservation and management in Washington state
(2022-07-14) Anderson, Robert M.; Biermann, Christine; Elwood-Faustino, Sarah
The state of Washington, USA has been rocked by conflict over wolves, which have recently returned to rural landscapes after their eradication nearly a century ago. While conservationists celebrate the rewilding of ecosystems, ranchers bemoan losing livestock to dangerous predators, and state officials struggle to develop a wolf management policy that will please all parties. Many stakeholders share goals of “reducing human-wolf conflict” and promoting “coexistence,” but the intensity of human conflict over how to manage the wolf population – especially when that management includes killing some individuals – demonstrates that there is little consensus about what coexistence means. Examining this landscape of controversy and conflict, I conceptualize wolf conservation as not merely a technical problem for scientists to solve, but reflective of deep-seated cultural, political, and economic differences. This dissertation is thus a critical examination of the sociopolitical norms, discourses, and processes that shape management of wolves as they (re)colonize territory, moving into landscapes where they enter new, often violent relations with human societies. It advances the geographic and interdisciplinary study of conservation as a social practice, engaging with perspectives from conservation social sciences including critical (human and physical) geography, political ecology, science and technology studies, animal/multispecies geography, human dimensions of wildlife management, human-wildlife conflict studies, and related work in wildlife ecology. It is the product of a multi-year, qualitative, ethnographic study of the entangled discourses and practices of wolf management in Washington state, with a particular emphasis on the ongoing controversy over lethal management. Arguing that the key barriers to mitigating wolf-livestock conflict are often not technical but social, I demonstrate how targeted killing of wolves that prey on livestock is used as a tool for the management of both social and ecological dynamics. I thus examine how emblematically “wild” animals are produced by and through conservation practices, and deeply shaped by human cultural, political, and economic systems. This analysis has significant impacts and implications for conservation practice and social science beyond the wolf conflict, raising important questions about the meaning of conservation and environmentalism in a world increasingly shaped by the actions of humans.
'Se Pesa': Structural Uncaring in the COVID-19 Pandemic and Caregivers' Kinships of Care
(2022-07-14) Orosco, Olivia; Ybarra, Megan
The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated racial and economic inequities in the United States, intertwining labor and health. This research focuses on immigrant Latina caregivers whose "essential labor" is often excluded from #HealthcareHeroes rhetoric. Building from insights gained working with immigrant-facing community organization in Tacoma, Washington, this research combines artistic portraiture and ethnographic methods to center caregivers as essential workers deserving of respect, attention, and artistic portrayal. Applying theories of racial capitalism and feminist care labor this work contributes to the growing body of scholarship on the ways in which the pandemic has highlighted racialized landscapes of uncaring. This project offers the opportunity to learn how caregivers continue to build kinships of care as they navigate precarity to care for themselves, their families, and clients when the state and their employers fail to care for them back.
New Labor Rights and New Work Arrangements: Shifting Geographies of Paid Domestic Work in Urban Brazil
(2022-01-26) Alcorn, Caitlin; England, Kim
In 2013, after decades of organizing, domestic workers’ unions in Brazil won an historic achievement: the extension of labor rights to the country’s more than six million domestic workers. This dissertation picks up where that moment left off by interrogating how the enactment of labor rights by domestic workers plays out after the legislation moves from the houses of Congress to the millions of homes across the country where domestic workers labor. Far from the straightforward legal advancement it was framed to be, the law has instead set off a renegotiation of employment relations and working conditions within the domestic service sector. This renegotiation, as argued throughout this dissertation, is ultimately structured by and through conflicts over social reproduction. This dissertation draws largely on interviews with domestic workers, domestic employers, and union representatives in the city of SÃ£o Paulo, as well as analyses of mainstream news media articles, domestic employment job postings, and government data sets. It seeks to untangle the unexpected ways the law is navigated by workers and employers and how the sector, so fundamental to Brazilian society and everyday life, shifts and adapts along the way. It takes up the theme of elite resistance along with literature on citizenship, relational class identity formation, and histories of racialized servitude to understand the causes and consequences of employers’ resistance to the changes brought about through the enactment of labor rights by domestic workers. This study then turns to the rise of day work arrangements in the sector and the growing class of domestic workers who remain excluded from the new labor protections. It explores workers’ motivations for entering into such labor arrangements and the ways that their continued legal exclusion serves to uphold the country’s broader regime of stratified reproduction and privatized care. Finally, this dissertation draws on theorizations of labor agency to uncover ways that workers make use of new state-granted rights while continuing to engage in longstanding informal strategies to control working conditions. In trying to reach beyond the individual versus collective binary, this dissertation emphasizes how such strategies are at once individually deployed and rooted in informal collective networks of workers.

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