A huge congratulations to everyone on some fantastic presentations. I watched quite a few of them, and I loved hearing about everyone’s different ideas. Everyone was so engaging and knowledgeable about her individual projects. I also want to say a huge thank you to everyone for our unconference hours, feedback on the short presentations, and of course a massive thank you to Bernhard and Milinda for the constant jokes and support. It has been a true joy partaking in your banter and learning from your intellect. Thank you for making my last semester here enjoyable and informative.
Marion
First of all, I could listen to you talk all day. Your accent is magnificent. Have you ever considered audiobooks?
Your topic is fascinating, and you did a wonderful job explaining it in a clear and concise manner. I was very appreciative of the different historiographical aspects of your presentation and how they each tie into each other. Have you researched the link between American national identity and the construction of wilderness? It is rooted in many of the same ideologies it seems you are drawing on in your long essay – man and nature as necessarily separate entities etc. If you have any interest in exploring this topic for your long essay, I have quite a few sources that could be very interesting to you!
Avery
Great presentation, Avery! It was super enjoyable to listen to and very informative. How have you found postcolonialism as a theoretical framework? Postcolonial feminism is an interesting theory, and clearly well suited for your research in Ireland and India. I was wondering if you have ever worked with decoloniality? Maria Lugones has some really interesting articles about decolonial feminism that might be helpful and interesting to your work. She explains that colonisation did not simply create the colonised but also forcibly introduced European understandings of gender relations, social patterns, and disrupted the cosmological understandings of invaded communities. This erased the pre-colonial conception of sex and gender and replaced it with European-produced-knowledge which separates ‘sex’ and ‘race’ on an axis. She argues that as ‘woman’ and ‘black’ are separable yet homogenous categories on the axis, their intersection “shows us the absence of black women rather than their presence”. Apologies if you have already read Lugones and I am mansplaining but I find her work really interesting and thought she might be helpful for your research! Goodluck with the rest of your paper and congratulations on an excellent presentation.
Kathleen
Hey, Kathleen! Great job on your presentation. In a funny turn of events, my essays have both taken a turn towards tourism and dictatorship, respectively. It was an interesting presentation to listen to because unlike some of the other topics I felt I had a bit more context given my prior research! The part about Intourist was particularly interesting. The aspect of your presentation about minority cultures “clinging to their past” reminded me of some research I have done about the concept of “conservation refugees”. I saw your comment on my “constructing culture” post and wanted to respond to it here as it pertains to your pres! You talked about the threat to biodiversity and general environmental degradation in national parks and other nature enclosures as a result of the tourism industry. I have worked with this topic but from an indigenous rights perspective that I thought I would share with you! This is a bit from an essay I wrote ages ago:
Indigenous dispossession through protected enclosures is an ongoing process that has severely impacted indigenous development across the country. According to Cultural Survival Quarterly (2004), in the last 150 years, 12 percent of the world’s surface has been protected in the form of 100,000 enclosures. Of those lands, 50% encompass traditionally indigenous lands… In America, this percentage rises to 80% (McKay and Caruso 2004). National parks and other protected areas have made “conservation refugees” (ibid.) out of millions of indigenous peoples; national parks are not a colonial act of the past but a pillar of the enduring settler colonial structure of oppression.
Also: The final statement from the indigenous delegates in the closing ceremony of the Fifth World Parks Congress meeting in 2003 read “first we were dispossessed in the name of king and emperors, later in the name of State development and now in the name of conservation.”
I thought this might be interesting food for thought for you to check out for your long essay or further reading!