When
Co-sponsored with the UA Southwest Center
With Caitlin Blanchfield, Columbia University, Architecture, Planning, and Preservation and Nina Valerie Kolowratnik, independent architectural researcher based in Vienna.
"Persistent Surveillance" discusses surveillance infrastructure on the Tohono O'odham nation within a history of settler colonialism and militarization in the borderlands. The talk will present a Counter-Environmental Assessment, made by Blanchfield and Kolowratnik in collaboration with tribal elders, that documents and describes the impact that Integrated Fixed Surveillance towers currently being built by Customs and Border Protection, as well as the systems of border militarization they bring with them, will have on Tohono O'odham culture and daily life. Through mapping, spatial analysis, interviews, and oral histories, this research project challenges the ways environmental review processes understand terms like landscape and its relationship to people, land use, material and immaterial culture, sovereignty, and environment itself.