On Relationality as Constellation: a conversation on decolonization and liberation

January 24, 2019 • Posted in Podcasts • 0 Comments

Magie Ramírez: Hello everyone. This is Magie Ramirez. I’m speaking to you now from Oakland, California – occupied Ohlone territories. I’m currently based at Stanford University as a Creative Cities fellow. And I have with me today my good friend and collaborator, Michelle Daigle.

Michelle Daigle: Hello everyone. I’m Michelle Daigle, and I’m a member of the Mushkegowuk, or Cree Nation, and I’m also a member of Constance Lake First Nation, which is located in what is now known as Treaty 9 Territory in northern Ontario, Canada. I’m joining you today from the ancestral and unceded territories of the Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh and Squamish nations. I work on Musqueam territory as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

Magie: We’re really grateful for this invitation from Vicky Lawson and Sarah Elwood to be a part of the Relational Poverty Politics podcast series and this has been a good opportunity for Michelle and I to think about our work through a different lens. Michelle and I, for the past six years, have been developing a dialogue and attempting a theorization at decolonial geographies. And while we don’t explicitly name this work that we’ve been doing as a “poverty politics”, per say, colonial dispossession and racial capitalist extraction, and the effects that these processes have on the communities that we live and work from, is really central to our thinking. So we thought that we would begin today sort of retracing our steps and how we began this dialogue on decolonial geographies and where it has taken us over these past six years….