Meskonsing-Kansan considers Indigenous land and the (colonial) Anthropocene in the territory between what are known today as the Wisconsin and Kansas rivers and the Wisconsinan and Kansan glaciations. This territory can be defined in terms of Indigenous removals, refusals, returns, and resurgence, particularly among the Ho-Chunk, Meskwaki, Iowa, and Kickapoo Nations. Meskoning-Kansan reveals how the land has been physically transformed by glaciers and colonization alike, and also by narratives and counter-narratives of glaciation and settlement. Meskonsing-Kansan focuses on Iowa homelands between the rivers and glacial edges. https://www.nicholasanthonybrown.net/meskonsingkansan
Swamp – Wetland – Bank is a speculative analytic for considering the violent ways wetscapes are reconfigured under different regimes of settler capitalist accumulation.
What is underlying the securitization of sea level rise in Miami? What does the governance of sea level rise look like? How is resiliency financing, as an operational strategy of risk management, reconfiguring the spheres of economy, polity and culture? Underlying is a seminar, series of learning walks and visual research that considers climate futures finance as linked with the unfinished business of inscribing settler colonial jurisdiction upon native (wet)lands and the production of racialized life. The project elaborates an experimental analytic by pairing discursive pathways with field trips or “learning walks”.
Tracing ways that petroleum and finance stabilize the settler colonial present and foreclose upon alternate futures by shaping understandings of community and participation. In search of hybrid methodologies for confronting settlerness as it coalesces around technical, material and financial practices, as well as affective orientations and ways of stabilizing the perceptual field. The project unfolds through a series of experimental “people’s field trips” that highlight indigenous knowledges and resistant practices.
A research device linking the the metropolitan region of Chicago to Kansas City, the Mexican port of Lazaro Cardenas and the Panama Canal. It consisted of a map/image/media room, a program of workshops and learning walks, a series of interpretive texts and concept maps, and an extensive website.
What is a container port? What is it connected to? What sort of ecology does it emerge from? What kind of world does it prefigure? Using field trips, analytical texts, historical archives and various artistic techniques, this course engages a set of sites sharing one paradoxical condition: they are so large, you practically can’t see them. How can we perceive, investigate, analyze, document, and speak back to such massively invisible objects?
“Extra-territoriality and deportability are instruments of statecraft, but they are also global regimes. The Foreign Trade Zone offers a perspective on the articulation of neoliberal logic and the state form: a dynamic process whereby territories and populations are increasingly zoned for optimal insertion into capital circuits, enforcing regimes of stratified spatiality.”
A self-organized series of walks, talks and mappings workshops across a range of Foreign Trade Zones; a series of field trips exploring border regimes and stratified mobilities in/around metro Chicago. This project opened up an ongoing study of the governing logic that links global just-in-time supply chains with the logistics of globalized labor.