“To see things in an objective light”: the Dakota Access Pipeline and the ongoing construction of settler colonial landscapes

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the discourses used by proponents of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) as claims of universality to which the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and allied activists mounted a movement of opposition in 2014–2017. We position our analysis within the historical context of Lakota and Dakota resistance to settler colonialism, which has endured since the nineteenth century. From publicly available texts circulated by key actors in the conflict over the construction of this pipeline project, we identify themes that proponents of this project drew upon to articulate their representations of the land as universal. We suggest that claims like these, when naturalized in practice, have historically materialized in settler colonial landscapes. With the concept of settler colonial landscapes, we focus on ways of seeing and representing places that have facilitated the dispossession of Indigenous people from their territory as well as the construction of a settler-dominated community. In this way, we develop a cultural geographical understanding of the ongoing construction of settler colonial landscapes as a process dependent on claims to neutrality and objectivity.     

Aspects of continuity and change in the Italian placitum, 962-72: The nature and significance of courtroom procedures

During the first seventy-five years of the tenth century in Italy three distinct procedures existed for the purpose of resolving jurisdictional disputes over property. Together they comprise the activity of a special court known only by the general term placitum. The property court, the placitum under discussion here, employed three procedures: (1) a litigation, (2) confirmation to avert possible conflict between two parties over opposing claims, and (3) a request for the confirmation of a commercial transaction.My study considers two problems: what purpose did the courts serve and to whom were they useful; second, what was the nature and intent of the procedures that these courts employed? The answers require an investigation of the personnel who administered the courts and the persons who sought court judgments, since the status and interests of both groups had considerable impact on the legal and institutional developments of this tribunal. The participants were mostly members of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and some of the higher lay magnates; by and large they were members of the ruling hierarchy.The property hearing had a long chain of development that reached into the late eight century: over the years it developed distinct procedures and instruments to record the results. These procedures reflect the interface of German and Roman law. We see in the history of this court the development of thoughts about evidence, the validity of written instruments as witnesses, and the role of judges as investigators.     

In Search of Causality: A Regional Approach to Urban Growth in Eighteenth-century England

The simple equation of industrialisation and urbanisation contains much truth: recent national surveys confirm that rapid coal-based industrial growth spawned massive urban development in Britain. And yet at the local level a wide diversity of growth experiences reflect a complex and overlapping nexus of growth stimuli which defy attempts at generalisation. In taking a regional perspective, this paper seeks to occupy a productive middle ground in this ongoing debate. Placing urban growth in north-west England into its real economic and geographical context, it recognises the complexities of urban growth but transcends the narrowness of the particular. In so doing, it challenges some of the certainties of industrial urbanisation, emphasising instead the importance of rural industry, urban commercial functions and inter-place linkages. Most fundamentally, it argues for a more nuanced understanding of the geography of causality.