The Conflict Shoreline: Colonialism as Climate Change

The Conflict Shoreline:
Colonialism as Climate Change
Colonial cartographers and administrators
have continuously attempted to define
Friday,
“environmental thresholds” within empire.
This lecture will speak about attempts at
March 20, 2015
scientifically defining, measuring and mapping
3:00 pm - 4:30 pm
the “aridity line” as the threshold of the desert
from the Ottoman period through the period
of European colonisation to the present.
The engagement and measurement of the
desert threshold is important because imperial
Michael Ames Theatre,
later national governments saw climate
Museum of Anthropology, and
change as the very goal of colonisation, as
6393 NW Marine Drive
they tried to expand the limits of arable lands,
make the climate more familiar to European
UBC, Vancouver
sensibilities and bring the nomads under
state control. … My aim will be to show that
climate change is not only the collateral,
Admission to the Museum of
unintentional side effect of the good intention
of modernisation and industrialisation but is
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faculty, staff and students with the very aim of colonial modernity. The lecture
will trace this debate through a trial of the
valid IDs.
small village of Al Arakib in the Beduin Naqb in
Israel, following the counter forensic methods
of “forensic architecture.”
the university of british columbia
FACULTY OF ARTS
Eyal Weizman
Goldsmiths College, University of London
Professor Eyal Weizman is Professor of
Visual Cultures and Director of the Centre
for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is the author
(among other books) of Hollow Land: The
Architecture of Israeli Occupation (2007),
The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian
Violence from Arendt to Gaza (2012), and
co-editor of Forensis: An Architecture of
Public Truth (2014).