Sign, Storage, Transmission

Infrastructural Mediation on the Settler Colonial Resource Frontier

By: Rafico Ruiz

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Paperback | 30 April 2021

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Paperback
240 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
20 x 15 x 1

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From the late nineteenth through most of the twentieth century, the evangelical Protestant Grenfell Mission in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, created a network of hospitals, schools, orphanages, stores, and industries with the goal of bringing health and organized society to settler fisherfolk and Indigenous populations. This infrastructure also served to support resource extraction of fisheries off Labrador's coast. In Slow Disturbance Rafico Ruiz engages with the Grenfell Mission to theorize how settler colonialism establishes itself through what he calls infrastructural mediation-the ways in which colonial lifeworlds, subjectivities, and affects come into being through the creation and maintenance of infrastructures. Drawing on archival documents, maps, interviews with municipal officials, teachers, and residents, as well as his field photography, Ruiz shows how the mission's infrastructural mediation-from its attempts to restructure the local economy to the aerial surveying and mapping of the coastline-responded to the colony's environmental conditions in ways that expanded the bounds of the settler frontier. By tracing the mission's history and the mechanisms that enabled its functioning, Ruiz complicates understandings of mediation and infrastructure while expanding current debates surrounding settler colonialism and extractive capitalism.

Industry Reviews

"At this moment of reckoning, where histories of colonial violence and their afterlives in economies of extractivism are at the center of struggle, Slow Disturbance offers a powerful and nuanced account of the infrastructural making of the resource frontier. A must-read for those invested in understanding and transforming settler colonial materialities and ecologies." -- Deborah Cowen, author of * The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade *
"Rafico Ruiz makes a critical contribution to media studies, settler colonial studies, and studies of infrastructure and the environment. A fantastic book." -- Nicole Starosielski, author of * The Undersea Network *
"Slow Disturbance is a valuable and much-needed text that provides thoughtful insights into the ways that resource frontiers are made and enacted through small and slow efforts to sustain settler lives. Ruiz brings a critical eye to the ways that media multiply functions in these colonial projects, opening up space for new approaches to reading colonial archives in relation to their material environments." -- Cameron Butler * Public *

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