Kyla Simone Piccin

Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) DTP & Rosalie Crawford Girton Studentship

Securing the Woods: An Analysis of Carceral Power and Logging Development at Ada’isx/Fairy Creek

Supervisor: Dr Lauren Wilcox (University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies)

Abstract:

Developed through site visits, semi-structured interviews, and data obtained through the Access to Information Act, Kyla’s doctoral project examines the geography of carceral power at the 2021 anti-logging protests surrounding the Ada’itsx/Fairy Creek watershed. While the dominant narrative of the events at Fairy Creek emphasizes the individual behaviours of police officers, this project situates police violence at Fairy Creek as not only unexceptional (and indeed, consistent with the history of settler-colonial policing), but as one feature amid a sprawling and diffuse geography of carceral violence at the site. The project contends that, at Fairy Creek, a complex geography of carceral violence supports the extraction of financial value from the forest ecology, securing the property rights of logging corporations and reproducing settler-capitalist authority in the landscape. In this way, carceral power at Fairy Creek is clarified as a settler-colonial function of extractive capital, and its multitudinous mobilities and circulations include but are not limited to the practice of on-the-ground policing and arrests. While the insights generated from this project are site-specific, they contribute to broader debates in understanding the carcerality of non-prison places and the distinct geographies of carcerality that emerge in resource extractive zones.

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, Security and Militarization, Carceral Geographies, Resource Extraction, Settler-Colonial Nation-Building, Colonial Property Regimes, Feminist Political Economy, Indigenous Studies and Anti-Colonial Struggle.