Post
Published on 5 March 2021
Dahdaleh Institute Postdoctoral Fellow James Stinson recently co-authored a published paper which advances the concept of biocultural nation making.
While the academic literature on biopolitics has investigated how the life of the population and its biological capacities have increasingly become the target of political concern and intervention largely at the scale of the nation, the literature on nations and nationalism has explored nations as cultural-territorial units including questions of their emergence, ongoing production, and impacts. What these share is a similar if not nearly identical object of analysis: the nation or national population. These, however, are realms of scholarly debate that have largely, and quite surprisingly, bypassed one another. The paper bridges various debates and illustrate that nation making is at once biological and cultural-territorial, and deeply intertwined. The authors ground this in the experience of Canadian national parks, highlighting how “natural” environments like national parks are key sites of biocultural, and increasingly neoliberal, national production. Here, state conservation organizations promote park visitation as a means of, first, enabling an active, healthy, and economically productive national population. Second, parks are promoted on the grounds that they enable the experience of distinctively Canadian landscapes and places of national inclusion especially as park visitorship is expanded to include nontraditional visitors including immigrants, urban communities, and the youth. Therefore the authors argue, Parks have become vehicles of biocultural, and increasingly neoliberal, nation making. While there are indeed affirmative aspects to this, the paper highlight hidden exclusions tied to the embrace of neoliberal logic, the limits of multiculturalism, and the ongoing erasure of Indigenous communities.
Themes | Planetary Health |
Status | Active |
Related Work |
N/A
|
Updates |
N/A
|
People |
James Stinson, Postdoctoral Fellow, Planetary Health & Education
|
You may also be interested in...
SMART Conservation and the Production of Nature 3.0 in Belize
This two-year project led by Dahdaleh Institute Research Fellow James Stinson will provide a qualitative and ethnographic examination of the Spatial Monitoring and Reporting Tool (SMART) and its use in terrestrial and marine protected areas ...Read more about this Project
Idil Boran Calls for "Adaptation Now" in an Opinion Piece About the IPCC Report on Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability
Dahdaleh Institute faculty member Idil Boran and Steffen Bauer co-authored an opinion article in the Current Column of the German Development Institute / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE). “Adaptation now! It’s time to shift gears towards a ...Read more about this Post
Don't Miss Our Winter 2023 Lineup of Events
Join us for a winter semester packed with insightful seminars from inspiring global health researchers at the Dahdaleh Institute: How to Influence Public Policy...What Happens When You Leave the Room? with Jean-Jacques RousseauGlobal Environmental Changes, ...Read more about this Post