Kyla Simone Piccin
Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) DTP & Rosalie Crawford Girton Studentship
Unsettling Carceral Landscapes of Extraction: An Abolitionist Feminist Analysis of Logging Infrastructure at Ada’isx/Fairy Creek
Supervisor: Dr Lauren Wilcox (University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies)
Abstract:
Addressing the root causes of the contemporary climate crisis is a primary concern for those most impacted by intensifying ecological disaster around the world. In Canada, marginalized communities, primarily Black and Indigenous communities, bear the brunt of environmental exploitation (Van Sant et al., 2021). These communities are also most directly impacted by carceral state violence, including disproportionate incarceration rates, police violence, and hyper-surveillance (Simpson, 2015). While struggles against carceral violence and struggles against environmental exploitation may seem disparate, there are deep connections and solidarities across these social movements. My project queries these interconnections through an exploration of the carceral and disciplinary logics enacted through Canada’s imperial regime of resource extraction. Through the lens of abolitionist feminist thought, I ask whether multi-species geographies of resource extraction can be understood not just as sites of colonial-capitalist accumulation, but also as gendered carceral sites, and if so, what this consideration contributes to contemporary thinking regarding solutions to climate crises. I seek to bridge and build on the literature in feminist political geography, multi-species justice, and critical prison studies by exploring the interconnections between the expropriation of Indigenous homelands, criminalization, capitalist expansion, gendered state violence, and environmental crisis within Canada’s imperial resource extraction regime as a function of on-going Canadian nation-building.
Academic Background:
Bachelor of Arts (Honours), International Development with Law and Policy, Trent University, Ontario, Canada
Master of Arts, Political Economy, Carleton University, Ontario, Canada
Research Interests:
Policing, Incarceration and Surveillance, Gendered State Violence, Criminalization, Feminist Political Economy, Extractive Geographies, Settler-Colonial Nation-Building, Colonial Property Regimes, Financialization and Resource Extraction, Multi-Species Justice, Decolonial Ontologies, Anti-Colonial Struggle, Militancy and Violence in Liberatory Struggle.