Events

CHAIRPERSON

Asst Prof Sayd Randle, College of Integrative Studies, Singapore Management University

PROGRAMME

ABSTRACT

This roundtable brings together speakers to discuss The Ends of Research: Indigenous and Settler Science after the War in the Woods, a new book by Tom Özden-Schilling that explores the afterlives of several research initiatives that emerged in the wake of the “War in the Woods,” a period of anti-logging blockades in Canada in the late twentieth century. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among neighboring communities of White environmental scientists and First Nations mapmakers in northwest British Columbia, Özden-Schilling examines these researchers’ lasting investments and the ways they struggle to continue their work long after the loss of government funding. He charts their use of planning documents, Indigenous territory maps, land use plots, reports, and other documents that help them not only to survive institutional restructuring but to hold on to the practices that they hope will enable future researchers to continue their work. He also shows how their lives and aspirations shape and are shaped by decades-long battles over resource extraction and Indigenous land claims. By focusing on researchers’ experiences and personal attachments, Özden-Schilling illustrates the complex relationships between researchers and rural histories of conservation, environmental conflict, resource extraction, and the long-term legacies of scientific research.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Dana E. Powell is Associate Professor in the Graduate Institute of Humanities in Medicine (GIHM) at Taipei Medical University and Affiliate Researcher at the Center for International Indigenous Affairs, National DongHwa University Taiwan. Powell joined the GIHM faculty in August 2023, following twelve years as faculty in the Department of Anthropology at Appalachian State University (North Carolina, USA), where she developed the Environmental Justice Co-Lab, a research and teaching collaborative aligned with rural, community partners addressing climate change, extractivism, and industrialized agriculture. Powell’s longstanding ethnographic research has been in partnership with colleagues in the Navajo (Diné) Nation in the American Southwest (2003-present), documented in her first book, Landscapes of Power: Politics of Energy in the Navajo Nation (Duke, 2018).

Kamal Solhaimi bin Fadzil is Senior Lecturer and Head of Department in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the Universiti Malaya, Kuala Lumpur. Fadzil has spent his career working with and on behalf of Orang Asli people in Peninsular Malaysia, where he has engaged in various research activities, including participatory mapping exercise to assist traditional landholders in their struggle to uphold recognition of their customary land. In addition to studying issues related to Orang Asli and development, Fadzil also advocates access to formal education for all students to include refugee and those without documentation and against stigma and discrimination of People Living With HIV/AIDS.

Timothy Neale is Associate Professor in Anthropology and a member of the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation at Deakin University in Narrm/Melbourne, Australia. His research addresses two overlapping fields of inquiry. The first focuses on the politics of settler and Indigenous relations to lands and waters, and the second examines natural hazards and disasters with a particular interest in the social and cultural life of their technical infrastructures. He is a co-editor of the journal Science, Technology, & Human Values.

Tom Özden-Schilling is Presidential Young Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the National University of Singapore. His first book, The Ends of Research: Indigenous and Settler Science after the War in the Woods (Duke, 2023), is a historical ethnography of twenty-first century environmental deregulation in British Columbia, Canada, and its effects on both Indigenous and settler researchers’ struggles to maintain long-term forestry experiments and sovereignty projects. Tom’s current project examines the emergence of new critical minerals exploration and research and development initiatives in Australia, Malaysia, and the American Mountain West.

REGISTRATION

Registration is closed, and instructions on how to participate in this hybrid talk has been sent out to registered attendees. Please write to ziqi@nus.edu.sg if you would like to attend the event.