Decolonial Perspectives on Justice and Territories

Mark Jackson (University of Bristol), Anna Laing (University of Sussex) will engage with decoloniality as a post-disciplinary perspective in the social sciences to present their ongoing research on justice and territories.

Rolando Vazquez (UCR-Middelburg) will act as discussant.  

In particular, Mark Jackson will reflect on questions of justice in postcolonial settler societies using indigenous legal theory drawn from recent interventions by indigenous legal scholars into questions of just recognition in the Canadian context of political reconciliation with Indigenous peoples. 

Based on her extensive ethnographic research with the lowland indigenous movement in Bolivia, Anna Laing will invite us to think how territory is re-produced as part of shifting - and often contradictory - visions of decolonial transformation.

About the speakers

Dr Mark Jackson is a Senior Lecturer in Postcolonial Geographies at the University of Bristol, UK.

He is the editor of the new book, Coloniality, Ontology, and the Question of the Posthuman (Routledge, 2018). His recent papers have appeared in the journals Progress in Human Geography, Geohumanities, and The Singapore Journal of Tropical Geographies, and he has contributed recent book chapters on political ontology and decolonial thought to The Sage Handbook of Nature 3rd Ed (SAGE 2018), Feelings of Structure: Explorations in Affect (McGill-Queens UP 2018), and a forthcoming book with Athabasca University Press on indigeneity, justice and coloniality in Canada.

Dr Anna Laing is Lecturer in International Development (Geography) at the University of Sussex, UK. 

Anna graduated from the University of Sheffield with a BA (1st class) in Geography in 2008, followed by an MA (Distinction) in Research in Human Geography in 2009. Her MA dissertation analysed an anti-consumerist and anti-capitalist movement in New York, USA. She then studied for her PhD in Geography at the University of Glasgow (2010-2015). Anna’s doctoral thesis ‘Territory, Resistance and Struggles for the Plurinational State: A Spatial Analysis of the TIPNIS Conflict’ explored a contemporary Left-indigenous movement that formed in resistance to the Bolivian government’s proposal to build a road through an indigenous territory and national park, known as the TIPNIS.

Dr Rolando Vazquez is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University College Roosevelt, Middelburg.