Elemental Warfare. From Colonial Legacies to Decolonial Resistance & Solidarity

Course director: Svitlana Matvienko, Simon Fraser University

This course is focused on the notion of “elemental media” or media as milieu—i.e., water, air, oil, or radiation—which takes us away from the object-hood of a medium to discover the elemental media regimes where media reveal themselves as relations and processes. By exploring the connections between imperialism, colonialism, militarism, Black and Indigenous resistance, knowledge practices, digital media developments, and climate change, we will investigate how social, cultural, political, and economic processes are inevitably caught up with media technologies and ecologies – not only when media entanglements make the lived environments we share, but even more so when they are weaponized for war. 

We will rethink environments as media and as processes that mediate and facilitate the production of accidental, and very non-accidental, territories of injustice—from border regimes and exclusion zones to slums, toxic sacrifice zones, occupied territories, and other terror environments. Our goal is to study the existing conceptual tools for recognizing the forms, vectors, temporalities, and dynamics of these subtle-yet-deadly hazards; and more importantly, to shake our imagination for envisioning, together, the infrastructures of care and co-existence, within our hopefully remediated landscapes or whatever remains of them.