Extraction and Land in Physics: Recent Episodes
emma mckay
A thesis about mining, colonialism, and changing science. Written, read, and produced by Emma McKay, with production assistance from Ezra Teboul.
Find the text of the thesis, including the references made in the audio version, here: https://stronglyinteracting.files.wordpress.com/2020/10/mckay-mrp.pdf
giving some time to grief; there's no such thing as a clean mine; tactics for resisting the structure of extractivism through physics; letting go of physics as we know it
describing and extending Barad's phenomena; complaining about how entanglement is not necessary to describe complex social systems; upending physics epistemology to focus on land
from neutron stars to the earth's crust, from workers underpaid hands to a slag-filled superfund site; some of the many connections built on violent colonial extractivism that take indium from the land to the lab
militaristic and colonial physics history; analysis of extractivist logic in experimentalist literature today
land as read from Watts, Kimmerer, and the Dish with One Spoon; the politico-economic hegemony known as extractivism; how we take things from being in specific emplaced relational context to being extracted through disorigining
how i came to view physics as needing to change; my intent and audience; the research questions; a summary of the rest of the thesis