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Asilo (Asylum). Lithograph tarp by J. Leigh Garcia, 2016  Moderator’s note:  Andrea Verschuyl (American Indian Studies, UW) presents two stories about how “indigenous peoples have long struggled against narratives that historicize them, marooning them in a distant past” and how one of the “great claim[s] of these discourses is that all Native peoples are dead.” Verschuyl continues: “In death, they are largely conceived of as a noble people whose erasure from the Earth was unfortunate … ” But we are still here; we endure; we are not ghosts of settler colonial and capitalist violence. Verschuyl’s essay goes beyond a mere critique of food “as a medium of insidious and destructive symbolic exchange … used by the state … to demand the deaths of Indigenous peoples asking for a better life. ”   She connects the experiences of indigenous transborder travelers avoiding death in the “weaponized landscape” of the Sonoran Desert and the hunger strike initiated in December, 2012 by At...

Maquiladoras. Monotype by Luis Gutierrez. Border walls as ecological disturbance and structural violence PART 1 | A POLITICAL ECOLOGY OF DISASTER CAPITALISM? Devon G. Peña | Seattle, WA | December 5, 2013 Posse existere potentia est. The power is to be able to exist. - Baruch Spinoza It was 1992 and a mere two years to go before NAFTA activation and the opening of Zapatismo on the global stage. I was back on the border, field tripping – and I do mean ‘tripping’ in the sense of returning to a familiar but always transforming region ten years after completing my 2½ year dissertation residence in the Twin City of El Paso- Ciudad Juárez. I was in serendipity mode trying to convert my dissertation into The Terror of the Machine and gathering new stories of shop floor politics and community struggles from maquila workers, managers, and organizers. There were plenty of continuing signs of the upwelling of multitudes-in-resistance on the border and elsewhere. Environmental justice activism ...

Credit: stoptpp.org Moderator’s Note: This is the first in a series of analytical reports that focus on a development in international treaty negotiations. This is the Trans-Pacific Partnership [i] or TPP, which is on Fast-Track path for approval as the framework for trade and investment among a group of Pacific Rim countries. The Trans-Pacific Partnership comprises a region accounting for approximately 40 percent of global GDP. According to the Wikileaks press release of 13 November,the current TPP negotiation member states are Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, United States, and Vietnam. Notably absent: China.  One of the things I noticed in reading through the so-called patents and intellectual property chapter is that the February 2011 document reflects a great deal more disagreement among the partners than has been discussed. It will be interesting to see ow and if these differences, some of which are discussed b...