Echoes of Empire: Property, Mineral, and Technosphere of the Settler Dominion

SCI 6520 Subject & Catalog Number

Description

Canada’s push to supply critical minerals for the global energy transition is often framed as a break from its past. This seminar argues otherwise. Returning to the 1924 British Empire Exhibition at Wembley, where Canada was presented as a land of inexhaustible resources, the course traces the ways in which the settler Dominion’s logics persist in today’s extraction frontiers. Operating on the understanding that resource grounds, infrastructure, waste, and atmosphere comprise a “thickened ground,” the seminar examines how matter, land, and technical systems have been organised to serve perpetual growth.

Phase One, On Mineral Classifications and Modelling, asks how minerals become “critical,” and provides answers by following the lineage of colonial resource extraction from imperial geological surveys to contemporary resource models

Phase Two, On Property, traces how surveys, treaties, and free-entry mining produced mining tenures on unceded Indigenous lands, and how these are currently being contested by Indigenous jurisdictions and rights of nature challenges.

Phase Three, On the Technosphere, follows minerals into the batteries, grids, smelters, data infrastructures, and waste streams of the transition.

Through archival research, mineral modelling, and drawn counter-narratives, students will explore how a green transition can escape colonial extraction and propose alternative regimes of power, property and production.