Settler-Colonial Placemaking: From Vikings to the Homestead Act

Catalog description

The term “settler colonialism” has become popular in recent years to define a spatialized structure of inequality between settler societies and Indigenous peoples. What exactly defines a “settler” in this context? What motivates the movement of people to “new” lands? What forms of violence do settlers enact on Indigenous land? And how has the contemporary landscape been shaped by settlement? To answer these questions, this course examines material and ideological transformations of space, architecture, infrastructure, and landscape that comprise the built environments of European settlements in the North Atlantic World. How might Colonial homesteads, plantations, fields and fences, mines and factories, mills and suburbs, capitals and museums, pipelines and railroads be considered built environments of settler colonialism and capitalism? How do these places come about, and what kinds of relations do they attempt to impose on Indigenous land?