Short Abstract:

In this "author meets critics" roundtable, panelists will discuss Tom Özden-Schilling's monograph, The Ends of Research: Indigenous and Settler Science after the War in the Woods, a critical study of the reproduction of White and First Nations research communities amidst anti-extractivist conflict.

Long Abstract:

In this "author meets critics" roundtable, panelists will meet with anthropologist Tom Özden-Schilling to discuss his recently published monograph, The Ends of Research: Indigenous and Settler Science after the War in the Woods. The book 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. By focusing on researchers’ experiences and personal attachments, Özden-Schilling illustrates the complex relationships between researchers and rural histories of conservation, environmental conflict, resource extraction, and the long-term legacies of scientific research. Offering a challenge to other STS scholars to attend more carefully to zones of settler and Indigenous conflict, the book contributes to scholarship on the reproduction of field-based research communities by by detailing the ways that individual knowledge workers’ idiosyncratic lives and aspirations can come to shape decades-long sovereignty battles, land claims, resource conflicts and other collective projects, and by showing how such projects re-shape individual lives in turn.