Description:

Speaker

Kim TallBear, University of Alberta, Canada

Title

"Close Encounters of the Colonial Kind"

Abstract

Much of this talk is spoken in the voice of IZ, a character Kim TallBear introduced in the 2016 essay, “Dear Indigenous Studies, It’s Not Me, It’s You: Why I Left and What Needs to Change.” IZ represents the evolving field that began as American Indian or Native American studies in the United States in the later twentieth century. Today, a later disciplinary iteration, Critical Indigenous Studies, represents a coming together of multiple “Indigenous self-determination and sovereignty political movements” around the world, as described by Aileen Moreton-Robinson. The IZ whom TallBear speaks of and from whose collective body she performs this talk, has grown into a twenty-first century expanding discipline. TallBear's object of study and critical polydisciplinamorous engagement is a scientist character who searches for signs of “intelligent” life off-Earth.

Biography

Kim TallBear, author of Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science (2013), is Professor in the Faculty of Native Studies, University of Alberta. She is also Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience, and Society. In addition to studying genome science disruptions to Indigenous self-definitions and the colonial ethics historically of genomic and other physical sciences, Dr. TallBear studies colonial disruptions to Indigenous sexual relations. She also studies and promotes Indigenous scientific and cultural challenges to settler-colonial study and objectification of Indigenous populations and our social and cultural practices.

You can follow her research group related to Indigenous science, technology and society (Indigenous STS) at https://indigenoussts.com/ that she co-founded with her Faculty of Native Studies colleague, Assistant Professor, Jessica Kolopenuk. TallBear has published research, policy, review, and opinion articles on a variety of issues related to science, technology, environment, sexualities, and Indigenous peoples in academic and popular journals including Wicazo Sa Review, Social Studies of Science; Science, Technology, & Human Values, Journal of Law Medicine & Ethics, Journal of Research Practice, Indian Country Today, Buzzfeed, and High Country News as well as in edited volumes published by University of Chicago Press and Routledge .