Please consider attending this upcoming talk, which is co-sponsored by the Ecologies of Social Difference Network! “A Tunnel to a Sacred            Place: Resistance to the Carceral Geographies of Militarism in Hawai’i.” with Dr. Laurel Mei Singh will be held virtually on               Zoom Wednesday, March 9th from 12-1 PM.

Abstract

This presentation will examine the antagonistic relationship between military occupation and locally situated human-environment intimacy that stands central to struggles for healthy livelihoods, environmental justice, and decolonization. Ethnographic and archival research in Hawai‘i, a place critical to US defense strategy, informs a theorization of military fences as a spatial expression of geographies of race and colonialism. They signify the state’s attempts to impose order through strategies of occupation, possession, and differentiation through the production of uneven access to life-giving resources. Yet while Hawai‘i functions as the Pacific Command headquarters that oversee military operations across half the earth’s surface, military presence does not impose unilateral hegemony on the islands. Rather, grassroots collective action that draws from Indigenous paradigms of human-environment connectivity persists and thrives. A Tunnel to a Sacred Place thus affirms the centrality of Hawai‘i and the Pacific to US war making while proposing a theory of Indigenous resistance against and in the shadows of a militarized carceral state.