Description
Book SynopsisIn
The Ends of Research Tom Özden-Schilling explores the afterlives of several research initiatives that emerged in the wake of the “War in the Woods,” a period of anti-logging blockades in Canada in the late twentieth century. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among neighboring communities of White environmental scientists and First Nations mapmakers in northwest British Columbia, Özden-Schilling examines these researchers’ lasting investments and the ways they struggle to continue their work long after the loss of government funding. He charts their use of planning documents, Indigenous territory maps, land use plots, reports, and other documents that help them not only to survive institutional restructuring but to hold on to the practices that they hope will enable future researchers to continue their work. He also shows how their lives and aspirations shape and are shaped by decades-long battles over resource extraction and Indigenous land claims.
Trade Review“In this nuanced ethnographic study of the lives and work of two intertwined communities of professional researchers in British Columbia, Tom Özden-Schilling captures the researchers’ hopes, dreams, frustrations, and disappointments as they struggle to make a living and make their work matter to current and future generations. Extremely well written and tightly argued,
The Ends of Research is an impressive and timely work of scholarship that makes important contributions to anthropology and science studies.” -- Paul Nadasdy, author of * Sovereignty’s Entailments: First Nation State Formation in the Yukon *
“In this wonderful book Tom Özden-Schilling rightly challenges and nuances overly simplistic narratives that present contemporary resource governance processes as either simply an antipolitical form of rule by experts or a neoliberal regime of token gestures to regulation in the service of capital. Extending the dialogue between critical science and technology studies, northern and Indigenous studies, and scholarship on environmental conflicts,
The Ends of Research is one of the best books I’ve read on Indigenous-settler relations in natural resource science.” -- Tyler McCreary, author of * Indigenous Legalities, Pipeline Viscosities: Colonial Extractivism and Wet’suwet’en Resistance *
Table of ContentsTimeline of Key Events vi
A Note on the Maps ix
Preface xiii
Acknowledgments xix
Introduction 1
1. Nostalgia: Placing Histories in a Shrinking State 35
2. Calling: The Returns of Gitxsan Research 73
3. Inheritance: Replacement and Leave-Taking in a Research Forest 111
4. Consignment: Trails, Transects, and Territory without Guarantees 149
5. Resilience: Systems and Survival after Forestry’s Ends 190
Epilogue 224
Notes 237
References 259
Index 287
