Zoe Todd - March 4 - George Link Jr. Environmental Awareness Lecture series

Please join us for the George Link Jr. Environmental Awareness Lecture!  This is the first lecture in the series focused on Indigenous Environmental Studies and Science.

Dr. Zoe Todd, Department of Sociology and Anthropology & the School of Indigenous and Canadian Studies, Carleton University

"Fish, fossils, fuel: kinship and claiming in Alberta's petro-economies"

Monday, March 4, 2019
3:30-4:00 Snacks and Conversation
4:00-5:00 Lecture
Haldeman 041

Abstract: This talk explores relationships between fossils, fish, fuel, and kinship in the context of settler petro-politics in Alberta, Canada. Exploring case studies of settler extraction of bituminous deposits in Northern Alberta, and scientific expeditions in the storied Burgess Shale in neighboring British Columbia, I examine how settler ontologies imagine and position the very ancient nonhuman beings whose fossilized remains subtend the Alberta economy.

Bio: Dr. Zoe Todd (Métis) is an artist and scholar from amiskwaciwâskahikan (Edmonton), Canada. She is an Assistant Professor at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada where she is affiliated with the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and the School of Indigenous and Canadian Studies. She holds a BSc in Biological Sciences (University of Alberta), an MSc in Rural Sociology (University of Alberta), and a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Aberdeen. She writes about fish, science, art, prairie fossilscapes, Métis legal traditions, the Anthropocene, extinction, and decolonization in urban and prairie contexts. In the past, she has researched human-fish relations and arctic food security in the Inuvialuit Settlement Region in the Northwest Territories, Canada. Her current work focuses on the relationships between people, fish, and other nonhuman kin in the context of colonialism, environmental change, and resource extraction in Treaty Six Territory (Edmonton, amiskwaciwâskahikan), Alberta and the Lake Winnipeg watershed more broadly.

Sponsored by the George Link Jr. Environmental Awareness Lecture series, the Environmental Studies Program and the Leslie Center for the Humanities.

Free and open to the public.