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This thesis asks how neoliberal enclavisation produces precarity. It focuses on eight months of fieldwork on large-scale dispossession of rural and peri-urban populations caused by the coal mining enclave in Tete, Mozambique, and my interpretation of Judith Butler's work on precarity, Henri Lefebvre's conceptualisation of the production of capitalist social space and Jacque Ranciere's understanding of politics. Bringing theory and empirical research together, I construct an original theoretical approach to explore how precarity as a condition of life, as well as the (im)possibility of politics, is constituted by contemporary capitalist expansion in Mozambique. I explore how precarity is produced through the interplay of structural, symbolic and direct violence of contemporary capitalist expansion, such as the coal mining enclave and resettlement sites inhabited by the dispossessed populations, in Tete. These processes of precarisation, I argue, result in the non-politics of abandonment that, whilst enabling life to be lived on precarious terms at the margins of the neoliberal mining enclave, does not openly challenge and only unwillingly reinforces the socio-material order of the neoliberal enclave. I demonstrate how this dynamic reconstitutes the precarity created by the violence of the neoliberal enclave and overshadows possibly different and progressively anti-neoliberal imaginaries of life and space in Tete. I conclude that these dynamics of precarity disactivate the possibility of transformative politics, and thus sustain and stabilise global capitalist expansion in Tete, and Mozambique more broadly. This reading of precarity makes several contributions to the literatures on the politics of precarity. It explores the condition of precarity outside the usual empirical and analytical focus of labour relations in the Global North, as well as developing a spatial reading of precarity. The thesis also challenges these, as well as broader literatures on agency in the context of structural inequalities and opportunities in Sub-Saharan Africa, for overestimating possibilities of resistance in situations characterised by extreme precarity. Finally, the thesis contributes to the literature on contemporary neoliberal capitalist expansion in Sub-Saharan Africa by demonstrating how neoliberal enclaves result in human suffering outside of their own exclusionary spaces of accumulation.

Just and equitable responses to the disparate impacts of climate change on communities and individuals throughout the world are at the heart of the concept of climate justice. Commodification, in the context of my research, is the process of monetizing nature and livelihoods for the purpose of surplus accumulation and profit maximization. In this study, my aim was to contextualize the concepts of climate injustice, disaster capitalism, and the commodification of lives and livelihoods in the specific setting of disaster vulnerability in southwest coastal Bangladesh. By conducting a case study in Kamarkhola and Sutarkhali regions of southwest coastal Bangladesh, I utilized discourse analysis and content analysis of livelihood interviews, semi-structured interviews, and policy documents to demonstrate the conceptual interrelation among global climate change, climate injustice, disaster capitalism, and capitalist expansion in environmentally precarious areas. I argue that in Southwest Coastal Bangladesh, the vulnerability to disasters stems from a complex and multifaceted layer of social hierarchies and inequalities, entwined with factors such as class and power relations. I also argue that Inequalities in the political, economic, and social realms have a key role in imposing vulnerability on disadvantaged people living in ecologically vulnerable areas. The perpetuation of inequality is sustained by the expansion and accumulation of capital through the dispossession and exploitation of natural resources. The existing approaches to climate change adaptation in the southwest coastal region of Bangladesh are deeply entrenched in neoliberal capitalism. The introduction of neoliberal economic policies, such as the privatization of state lands and the promotion of export-oriented aquaculture, created favorable conditions for capitalist expansion in environmentally vulnerable places through "accumulation by dispossession."

Abstract: This study examines Altay Prefecture, one of China’s border regions inhabited by ethnic Kazakhs, as a case to elucidate how the Chinese state has achieved dispossession and accumulation through the management of ethnicity and culture in an ethnic minority region. Within the framework of a case study, I employ document analysis and ethnographic fieldwork methods to collect data, which is then analyzed using the critical policy framework. The research results reveal an intensive, specific set of programs that aim to integrate Kazakh people and land into the Chinese economy and rapidly restructure Kazakh livelihoods, justified by the Ecological Civilization and the Anti-Poverty War in Xi's era. Under the guise of Ecological Civilization, the Chinese state has achieved dispossession and accumulation in Altay Prefecture by dispossessing Kazakh land and dismantling Kazakh nomadism. In the name of the Anti-Poverty War, the Chinese state has developed husbandry, agriculture, and ethnic tourism, which produce value by commodifying, exploiting, and eliminating Kazakh identity and culture simultaneously. This study contributes to our understanding of how dispossession and capital accumulation operate in one of China’s ethnic minority regions, and the results have implications for China's policy adoptions at a local level and for geopolitics in Central Asia.

This qualitative dissertation study focuses on the effects of neoliberal school reforms and their effects on a charter school in an historically dispossessed Chicago community. The author situates the school’s micro-level culture within larger macro-level, exo-level, and meso-level contexts to explore the interactivity between nested, ecological systems. The author argues that historical dispossession is an institutional trauma that is the result of unhealthy systems and neoliberal circuits of worth that result in undue accumulation for some and systemic/institutional dispossession for others. The study serves as an object of reflection for exploring the efficacy of neoliberal school reforms and provides empirical evidence, a philosophical reflection, and pedagogical implications based on the school’s “predestined failure” and the school’s resulting “story of dispossession.” Student, families, the community, and educators all experienced varying levels of dispossession based upon a myriad of converging neoliberal logics that had created a field of possibilities for educators who intended to provide a high-quality educational choice in the form of a charter school founded through philanthrocapitalist financial funding and a corporatized process for gaining charter school approval in the city of Chicago. Utilizing Critical Race Theory, post-structuralism, grounded theory, and the concept of neoliberal circuits of worth, the author traces neoliberal logics from macro- to micro- systems. The author argues that institutional systems that exacerbate historical dispossession within new generations creates compounded deprivation and systemic/institutional trauma that is transmitted to those who are repeatedly dispossessed by the public institutions that are purported to provide them with equal and equitable educational opportunities. The need for healthy public systems and implications for moving forward both within school settings and within the field of educational research are explored.

Deregulated Cinema: Post-Dictatorship Film and the Neoliberal Transition in Chile and Argentina offers a selective reading of neoliberal era Chilean and Argentine films and texts to suggest how Southern Cone cinema has responded to the transformation of modes of production and organizations of power imbricated with the transition. Part one of Deregulated Cinema illustrates the emergence of neoliberal spatial arrangements through the films of Patricio Guzmán to suggest the scale by which the sensorium has been altered and interpolated to work by transformations in visuality because, as Guzmán’s films indicate, such transformations have important implications not only for cinema but concepts like history and nostalgia. Similarly, I propose that the films of the Nuevo Cine Argentino (NCA), which have tended to be read as anti-allegorical, respond to the conditions of expropriation that defined the neoliberal period in Argentina, with images that underline the relations of labor and looking. In this way, Deregulated Cinema contributes to contemporary debates about post-dictatorship Latin American cultural studies as well as film and media theory.

In this dissertation, I investigate the relationship between underdevelopment and Black geographies. I then explore the consequences of this relationship on the city of Oakland. From 2019 to 2021, I conducted 68 in-depth field interviews of Black Oakland residents who detailed the processes and mechanisms by which California housing policy contributed to the displacement of Black subjects. Building on the work of scholars of Black geographies, I have interrogated the myth of development and the relationship to the dispossession of Black geographies. I theorize how racial capitalism produces vulnerable populations through housing in urban areas. The empirical contribution of my research is to provide a framework for Black geographies as people are being displaced. The theoretical contribution is to provide a conceptualization for Black geographies existing through abjections and placelessness as understood through residents of Oakland.I argue that the relationship between dispossession and refusal creates a distinct politic. In chapter two, I theorize the work of Moms for Housing to further understand Black knowledges of resistance to dispossession. Moms for Housing is used as a case study to highlight the many theoretical implications of dispossession occurring in Oakland. In chapter 3, I use two interviews from developers to demonstrate the contradictions in what I call the mythology of development. In chapter 4, I walk through the geographic stories of 2nd and 3rd generation Oakland residents and demonstrate each of the ways they feel locked out of the city as a result of the urban changes. In chapter 5, I demonstrate how communities resist dispossession and disposability. The city of Oakland lacks proactive implementation of equitable housing policy. The lack of action by the city of Oakland puts the onus on everyday residents to organize against their landlords, employers and the state.

Abstract: Transnational corporations promise win-win development, but extractive projects often deliver dispossession, displacement, impoverishment, environmental degradation, and disrupt social relations in rural localities. These conditions can in turn engender contestation and resistance to dispossession, including learning in social action in anti-dispossession struggles and movements. Roșia Montană, Romania, is one such site where Roșieni villagers and small land holder peasants, their organizations AM and RMCF, and trans/national solidarity campaigns/movements have waged two decades of resistance against a proposed Canadian open-pit mining project. The purpose of the proposed research was to develop an initial and exploratory understanding of knowledge production and learning in social action undertaken by these agents in Roșia Montană by addressing the following research questions: (1) what is learning in social action in a context of mining dispossession?; (2) how does learning inform social action?; and (3) how do trans/national actors augment local struggles and contribute towards learning in social action? Utilizing a critical research methodology and a critical case study strategy pertaining to this site of mining resistance, the research sought to develop an initial and exploratory understanding of learning in social action in Rosia Montana. Data collection to develop the case study included: 16 semi-structured interviews with 18 participants including Roşieni members of grassroots groups and activists/NGO members; observation at the case site; and a review of documents produced or used in struggle. Thematic analysis elucidates several aspects of learning in social action. Participants shared knowledge constructed in struggle pertaining to the anatomy of dispossession, including corporate tactics and Roşieni counter tactics. The initial Roşieni grassroots struggle was catalyzed by processes of incidental learning and resistance, which quickly spawned more intentional forms of learning and praxis. Knowledge developed through learning in social action informed: grassroots and social movement organization, future actions, and more structured and complex forms of learning—especially when augmented by growing support from a trans/national solidarity network. These findings contribute to the conceptual, theoretical, and empirical literature on rural dispossession, resistance, and learning in social action by highlighting the politics of dispossession as understood by Rosieni. Further, this research illustrates processes of learning in social action at the nexus of grassroots and trans/national solidarity and contributes towards an understanding of how diverse forms of learning in social action are integral to processes of resistance and contestation addressing capitalist mining dispossession.

Land has been essential to American military power in Korea from 1945 into the present day. The dissertation charts the evolution of American “land power” in South Korea, focusing on the transition from direct military dispossessions during the Korean War to a US military real estate system that became increasingly enmeshed in South Korea’s land development system in the post-war decades. Today, American land power in South Korea consists not only of the US military’s ability to project force from a point in space, but also of land valued as a commodity in a way that serves the ongoing US military presence in the country. In the early 2000s, military lands accumulated during the Korean War through mass civilian dispossession began to function as assets in the US-South Korea burden-sharing system. Even with a reduction of the total number of US bases in South Korea, alliance burdens have been increasingly shifted onto South Korea and onto localities. The South Korean state has treated most released US military lands as an asset used to fund the US-South Korea alliance, essentially forcing local communities to either repurchase their own lands back from the state, or to lure investors and developers to do so by passing deregulatory measures. Further, political devolution and neoliberalization created conditions in which the politics of (de)militarization were almost entirely subsumed by a new pro-growth and pro-deregulation politics of development in many places. The dissertation argues in favor of a multi-scalar anti-dispossession critique of US militarism that considers (de)militarization as a process that extends beyond the walls of any military base and into a landscape of uneven local development.

This project traces the history and legacy of the seizure of Harris Neck, approximately 2,600 acres on the Georgia coast, once largely composed of rice and cotton plantations. After the Civil War, freedmen and women transformed the area into a thriving Black community. The community of approximately a hundred families, a school, a church, a post office, and many small farms and businesses flourished from the late 1800’s until 1942, when the federal government seized Harris Neck for use as an Army airfield. The procedures used by the federal government to seize and, later, reallocate Harris Neck will be examined, as these processes are grounds for a long struggle for the return of Harris Neck to former owners. Two key elements of the dispute will be examined in depth: the way in which Harris Neck families were notified of eminent domain procedures and associated rights and whether former landowners should have been given the opportunity to repurchase their land after it ceased to be used by the US Army. Ultimately, governmental policies and political maneuvering meant the land and its facilities were offered first to state and local governments, and it is at this point that any path toward repurchasing property was foreclosed to former landowners. This narrative constitutes an important history of a strong Black community in the Jim Crow South. After Harris Neck’s tenure as an Army airfield, local officials lobbied for and took ownership of Harris Neck. Under an agreement with the Civil Aeronautics Association, the county government committed to utilizing the facilities as an airport. However, the area was instead enrolled in the county’s long history of corruption and race-based oppression. Even after the federal government retracted the deed due to breach of contract, Harris Neck continued to enrich local whites. In 1962, Harris Neck became a National Wildlife Refuge and since has provided recreational opportunities for and added to property values of local, primarily white residents. Today, Harris Neck’s Black community has been largely written out of Harris Neck’s history, as published by its managing agency, the US Fish and Wildlife Service. Tracing the ways in which Harris Neck has continued to exist as a site of loss and oppression connects a seemingly distant initial seizure with a much longer history of indifference to and dismissal of Black communities. Finally, the project examines efforts by former Harris Neck community members to reclaim their properties. Legal battles have been fruitless, as statutes of limitations and legal principles like res judica have stymied suits filed by former Harris Neck community members. Congressional hearings have provided a platform for and validated oral histories of former Harris Neck residents but have failed to bring tangible change. In recent years, Harris Neck Land Trust has emerged as an advocacy organization pursuing various “equitable solutions” to the current struggle over Harris Neck. In the final section of this dissertation, the shifting aims and the tireless efforts of Harris Neck Land Trust will be examined as an instructive example of community organizing and self-advocacy.

Dispossession has been playing a central role in capitalist accumulation over the last four-hundred-year history of modern capitalism. This dissertation theorizes how dispossession contributes to producing and reproducing the capitalist mode of production in Bangladesh. To do so, the dissertation empirically examines three interrelated aspects of dispossession in its three analytical chapters. First, it explores how the state and the market work in tandem to organize and control dispossession while grabbing land and expelling peasants from their places. Next, it investigates how dispossession contributes to providing 'potential capitals,' such as grabbed land and dispossessed peasants, to the production sites to be converted into 'constant capital' and 'variable capital' and to creating antagonistic class relations. Finally, it explores how market and non-market actors control those dispossessed peasants-turned-workers inside and outside factories to produce surplus values in order to reproduce the capitalist system locally and globally. These three interactive components of dispossession show three successive phases of capitalist accumulation: land-grabbing by divorcing independent producers from their livelihoods (the initial phase), converting land into capital, peasants into wage workers, and non-capitalists into capitalists (the intermediate phase), and controlling and exploiting those wage workers to produce surpluses or a cycle of new capital (the final phase). This dissertation accordingly advances a full-scale theory of dispossession in its concluding chapter by examining how the starting, intermediate, and ending points of dispossession contribute to capitalist accumulation. The dissertation draws on a wide range of empirical evidence collected from Panthapath, Dhaka, Bangladesh. These include 77 life histories, 50 interviews, a land-use survey of 1,007 structures, and a short survey of 147 slums. It also uses various historical records and archival documents. The three major findings of this dissertation are as follows. First, the dissertation shows that the state acts as a class to organize land grabs, often working in tandem with the private sector, but also in direct competition with the market. Not only does the state monopolize extra-economic means to grab land, but the market also often gains access to extra-economic means. Next, the dissertation shows that dispossession works to privatize the commons, proletarianize subsistence labor, create antagonistic class relations, and redistribute wealth upward. Finally, the dissertation identifies a new regime of labor control, called social despotism, that dominates and exploits workers in factories to produce surpluses. I conclude this study with policy recommendations designed to address the various dimensions of structural injustice described in this dissertation.

This dissertation examines the relationality of dispossession, racialization, and migration in Detroit, connecting the neoliberal rationality of (re)development to its foundations in Indigenous dispossession and racialized labor. “(Sīˈtĭng) Detroit” understands Detroit as a bordertown, where “the border” is the organizing structure and condition for the operation of settler colonialism in Detroit. From the international boundary to the county line, the border is the on-the-ground, everyday method for controlling space, disciplining populations, and limiting mobility for racialized subjects. To examine possession and belonging in a Black city on an international border, this dissertation introduces a “(sīˈtĭng)” — a methodology for locating (siting), seeing (sighting), and discussing (citing) dispossession as a social process and discourse produced and reproduced in the built environment through news reports, maps, plans, statements, advertisements, murals, graffiti, landscape, and architecture. “(Sīˈtĭng) Detroit” cites the sites and sights of Detroit’s Woodward Avenue to halt the dispossessive logics of renewal and redevelopment. Then, it goes “off-site” to unsettle them.

This dissertation explores historical and ongoing contests over the production and policing of the public cultural landscape in Oakland since World War II. Recently, these struggles have surged to the center of local and national concerns about gentrification and displacement through impassioned conflicts over longstanding Black-centered cultural practices like barbecuing, drumming, and dancing in public. Indeed, these attempts to regulate Black collectivity and conviviality resonate with the rapid arrival of privileged residents, companies, and real-estate speculators in the city since the Great Recession, all of which has uprooted working-class communities of color, especially African Americans. As this study reveals, however, this process is at the same time much more complex and entrenched than the notion of gentrification as an emergent mode of urban restructuring suggests.In this text, then, I argue that the current moment in Oakland resounds with what I call racial reverberations—looping patterns of racialized dispossession, cultural (re)production, and resistance that disturb bounded notions of time and space. This consideration of racial reverberations causes me to attune to sound, music, and dance as sites of an emancipatory spatial politics of pleasure, on one side, and a repetitive liberal drive to repress “disturbances” to the raced and classed order of the city, on the other. Further, in contrast to linear narratives of urban change, whether in terms of development or decline, this approach attends to the recursive and looping nature of racial and spatial politics in Oakland and other U.S. cities. I thus trace the politics of racial reverberations in Oakland through a sequence of what I call socio-sonic arrangements—or epochal configurations of race and urban space, cultural production and policing, that remix rather than replace the relations that precede them. This, I argue, reveals the enduring ways that attempts to rid the city of “disturbances” serve to perpetuate norms of liberal reason and liberal racism that, while seemingly “race neutral,” drive anti-Black dispossession and spirited resistance. The text is split into three sections. The first section (Chs. 1 and 2) traces changes in Oakland’s socio-sonic arrangements before and after Black Power. It argues that, after World War II, Black migrant youth found themselves mired in geographies of racial segregation and assimilation that resounded in the Oakland Blues. In response, they remixed the call for Black Power into a new sound—what I call, after Rickey Vincent, the Beat—that disturbed the choreographies of public culture administered by Oakland’s Jim Crow. Then, in the 1970s and 80s, the Black Power revolt accelerated the rise of the city’s Black political and economic elite at the same moment that disinvestment, drug-related violence, and other intersecting crises introduced a deep sense of insecurity. Mayor Lionel Wilson thus implemented new modes of regulation meant to secure the precarious “quality of life” in working-class communities of color. In the process, Oakland underwent a shift in the object of policing from “Negro” to “nuisance,” especially “noise,” in ways that tended to condemn and control the emancipated youth cultures of the Beat. In the next two sections, the orientation of the text switches from time to space as it charts the socio-sonic arrangement associated with this apparently race-neutral mode of what I call governing through nuisance across a series of interrelated cultural sites. The second section (Chs. 3 and 4) reveals that, in the 1990s, Oakland solidified this new regime of policing through a moral panic about the disturbances of “hyphy” rap and illegal car parties called “sideshows.” The anti-sideshow campaign led to a reorganization of the optics/sonics, tactics, and relations of policing in ways that echoed out to surround young people of color—in particular, young Black men—as they circulated across the city’s recreational landscape to spaces like cultural festivals. The third section (Chs. 5 and 6) then demonstrates that, as a regional economic resurgence put local reinvestment within reach, Oakland’s leaders staked their development aims on the revival of the city’s nightlife. At the same time, the rising popularity of rap—linked, in the minds of some club owners and regulators, to the violence of local drug economies and recklessness of sideshows—led to an increased focus on techniques of security. In this context, regulators sought to manage the tension between the drive to attract crowds and the increased securitization of the night through what I call frequencies of government, which made Downtown Oakland’s “renaissance” a site of racialized dispossession, as well.

American Indians occupy numerous social and cultural intersections. These intersections shape the ways in which each are subjected to systemic racism. In the case of Indigenous people, each of its manifestations is inextricably linked to the settler motivation to dispossess Indigenous Peoples of their lands. However, the resulting dispossession goes far beyond the relationship between tribes and their lands or political sovereignty. Native people are ultimately dispossessed of personhood and the sovereignty of self, body, mind, and spirit. They are dismembered through physical, spiritual, psychological, and cultural strategies by a pervasive settler culture, the consequences of which affect the self- and community-appraisals internalized by Native people themselves. This is a story of Indigenous people and their communities seeking to heal from the traumas of systemic racism and colonialist dispossession and dismemberment in the ways that they (re)member how to do, drawing on the brilliance of Indigenous wisdom and tradition. This is a study about Indigenous Americans seeking to thrive, to be whole.

In 1991, India adopted neoliberalism, a system of political economic practices that promotes private property and free trade, as its political and economic system to promote development in their country. India's neoliberal reform has created issues surrounding human development, resource accumulation, and power struggles. Eleven years later, in 2002, Bt cotton was introduced to the Indian agricultural sector. This research examines how the genetically modified organism Bt cotton is being used to commodify nature in the context of agriculture under neoliberalism. The research focuses on the dispossession of the rural farmers through the commodification of agriculture using Bt cotton. Dispossession of the rural farmers happen through the implications that arise from the commodification of nature. Through Marxist theory of primitive accumulation, this research analyzes accumulation by dispossession and how it neglects the working class and its struggle in rural India. Through this examination, the research will argue alternatives to the dispossession of the working class and the commodification of nature through Bt cotton. Dispossession, in this research, is examined both through working class, but also through the dispossession of biodiversity. Through the loss of biodiversity, the rural farmers are becoming dispossessed from a more sustainable environment. Along with these goals, the research will also incorporate themes of food security through changing landscape of agriculture due to the incorporation of Bt cotton. This research argues the contradictions that are presented through the commodification of agriculture under neoliberalism and provide a contribution to social justice literature, and our understanding of the relationship between technology and the commodification of nature.

“Resisting Spatial Dispossession: Contemporary and Historic Performative Irruptions in California and Louisiana” focuses on the symbolic and material spatial dispossession of primarily black Americans in California and Louisiana. Using the migratory patterns of the Great Migration as a framework to explore the relationship between historic and contemporary dissident spatial practices in the carceral state, my project seeks to illuminate complex performances of race, gender, and sexuality that often fall out of or never make it into the archive.Anchored in black feminist thought and spanning four distinct mediums (theater, film, photography, and music), “Resisting Spatial Dispossession” explores the role media plays in spatial dispossession narratives, particularly ones around and about black female subjects. Chapter one links the Los Angeles Poverty Department’s (LAPD) theatrical representation of prison spaces with gendered experiences in Skid Row to illustrate the ways in which gender conditions spatial practice. Chapter two interrogates how the gendered specter helps us rethink the relationship between visibility, gender, and violence in sites of spatial dispossession as well as actor/spectator dynamics. through an exploration of We Just Telling Stories, a documentary on Rhodessa Jones’ “Medea Project: Theater for Incarceration.” Chapter three uses Beasts of the Southern Wild (Zeitlin, 2012) and People’s photograph-heavy “Katrina Girl” series to examine narratives that call upon black girls to produce an imagined future grounded in the reproduction of a structure hostile to black life. Chapter four focuses on Amy LaCour’s transformation of poetry written by African American women during the Great Migration into music and the ways in which LaCour addresses complicated notions of black female sexuality and transhistoric, multiplanar gendered violence. “Resisting Spatial Dispossession” reveals the productiveness of utilizing black feminist epistemologies to chart performance as a cartographic tool in the mapping of spatial dispossession and the accompanying dissident responses.

This dissertation investigates the impact of the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 on the development of art, art institutions, and aesthetic discourse in India and Pakistan in the twentieth century. At the core of this study is the history of the Lahore Museum, whose collections of art and archaeology were divided between the emerging nations of India and Pakistan beginning in 1948. My analysis traces the contours of this division of movable art and heritage, against the broader spirit of madness of the period, to bring forth the crisis of dispossession that the Lahore collections endured in response to this unprecedented process of bifurcation. I argue that the fate of the Lahore collections in the twentieth century dramatizes the partition’s empirical and epistemological ramifications for art and art writing across South Asia both then and now. It exposes the forms of physical and ideological violence imposed on art and culture in the course of this process of decolonization and nation-building; it elucidates the pivotal role that museums have played in negotiating the ruptures of place, history, and identity concomitant to the experience of partition in South Asia; and, it unravels the dialectics of non-belonging and nationalization that entangle India and Pakistan into the present. I contend, moreover, that the case of the Lahore Museum stands as an allegory for the partition as an unfinished process of cultural fragmentation in South Asia. Methodologically, this dissertation combines extensive archival records, formal analysis of art objects, and histories of archaeology and museum spaces, with debates in Indian historiography and post-colonial criticism to weave a cross-border history of art and museums. It uproots the nationalist logic at the center of prevailing art historiography in South Asia by foregrounding repressed art histories of division, displacement, and dispossession. By writing on and across the Indo-Pakistani border, my analysis further emphasizes the continued ties between archives and museum collections in India and Pakistan, and seeks to intertwine these resources otherwise isolated by virulent national divides. In the process, this dissertation asserts the necessity of the visual arts to any writing of partition history in South Asia, and ultimately exposes how the experience of partition in South Asia has, through either memory or representation, perpetuated a pervasive ethos of division that continues to structure the art history of modernism in India and Pakistan today.

In a number of recent controversies, from sports teams’ use of Indian mascots to the federal government’s desecration of sacred sites, American Indians have lodged charges of “cultural appropriation” or the unauthorized use by members of one group of the cultural expressions and resources of another. While these and other incidents make contemporary headlines, American Indians often experience these claims within a historical and continuing experience of dispossession. For hundreds of years, the U.S. legal system has sanctioned the taking and destruction of Indian lands, artifacts, bodies, religions, identities, and beliefs, all toward the project of conquest and colonization. Indian resources have been devalued by the law and made available for non-Indians to use for their own purposes. Seeking redresses for the losses caused by these actions, tribes have brought claims under a variety of laws, from trademark and copyright to the First Amendment and Fifth Amendment, and some have been more successful than others. As a matter of property law, courts have compensated—albeit incompletely—the taking of certain Indian lands and have also come to recognize tribal interests in human remains, gravesites, and associated artifacts. When it comes to intangible property, however, the situation is more complicated. It is difficult for legal decision makers and scholars alike to understand why Indian tribes should be able to regulate the use of Indian names, symbols, and expressions. Indeed, non-Indians often claim interests, sounding in free speech and the public domain, in the very same resources. To advance understanding of this contested area of law, Professor Riley and Professor Carpenter situate intangible cultural property claims in a larger history of the legal dispossession of Indian property—a phenomenon they call “Indian appropriation.” It then evaluates these claims vis-à-vis prevailing legal doctrine and offers a normative view of solutions, both legal and extralegal.

This dissertation documents the processes and outcomes of Chinese government efforts to address national environmental problems through master planned "green development" projects. These large-scale spatial planning projects include eco-city and eco-industrial parks, and integrate goals for industrial, urban and rural development. Such efforts explicitly attempt to simultaneously "green" the economy, society and space; that is, to reduce the negative environmental impact of economic growth, to produce the social norms to support optimized use of resources, and to construct the human-ecological places where an "ecological civilization" can flourish. I find that the ideology of green development, taken from international and national sources, is projected onto local processes of place making. This process works to construct environmental resources at trans-local scales, and to justify rural dispossession as environmentally rational. I then document how national environmental governance agendas target rural society and space as backward and as the necessary site for intervention. I argue that green development in China extends practices of rural dispossession and deepens patterns of urban-rural inequality. Furthermore, I demonstrate that these patterns present significant negative environmental externalities as local governments transform rural landscapes to provide cheap land and financing for projects of China's "Green Leap Forward." To explore the policies, institutions and practices that make up these processes, this dissertation focuses on Yixing, a third-tier city in Jiangsu province, where the construction of eco-city, solar and other `green' industry projects have been yoked as the engines for rural transformation. To begin, I describe the national and regional contexts of environmental industry construction and eco-city planning. I document the growth of solar manufacturing, eco-city construction and linked projects for agricultural modernization and ecological conservation that have required the enclosure of over 330 square-kilometers of rural land and the displacement of over 55,000 residents since 2006. The local government expects to displace another 50,000 residents in master planned rural-urban transformation by 2020. I further document how these primarily state-led processes of dispossession and development planning refigure rural state-society and social-environmental relationships in the rapid construction of "new" ecologically rational city-regions. I argue that these processes are fundamentally linked to a revaluation of rural environmental resources and forms of agrarian transition that entail dispossession and the elimination of the land ownership system, which is bifurcated between state-urban and collective-rural structures. I analyze three processes through which this strategy unfolds. First, I examine the construction of a model of green development based on master-planned eco-urbanization and rural environmental governance at regional and national scales. I document and analyze the institutionalization of green development in the national policies of the Chinese government, the practices of municipal agencies, and in the approaches of transnational experts and businesses operating in China. I demonstrate that this model envisions a reallocation of rural land resources for master planned urban expansion. As its primary rationale, the model seeks to address the historical environmental failures of China's present model of industrial modernization and is predicated on restructuring municipal authority over rural land use.Second, I document how these changes shape agrarian transition by revaluing rural land as an environmental resource. I examine the environmental justification of rural dispossession and the dissolution of collective land tenure rights as economically and environmentally untenable. I argue that as rural livelihoods come to be designated as environmentally irrational and rural land is made into an object of planning, environmental value is paradoxically abstracted and divided from actual landscapes. I demonstrate that rural cash assets as well as land are enclosed into green development and contribute to circuits of accumulation based on "exporting sustainability." I show how the processes of eviction and resettlement re-inscribe historical urban-rural inequalities into a new geography of peri-urban segregation and class differentiation.Third, I argue that environmentalization in China is fundamentally tied to structural changes in territorial-administrative authority. Through an examination of local governmental practices in planning and land management, I document the construction of spatial uniformity and land resources at the national scale. I argue that in deploying a national land-use quota system, local governments fundamentally reshape the land management regime so that instead of managing the land itself, abstracted quanta of land are the objects that are being governed. This leads to negative social-environmental consequences that manifest in specific localities, and that undermine goals of sustainability at all scales. As a case study, I examine the rapid state-facilitated construction of the solar photovoltaics industry in Yixing through subsidies in land, infrastructure and finance capital. Such practices link rural dispossession in China to the global green economy. Additionally, large-scale and rapid construction on greenfield sites produces direct and indirect land-use change impacts on the carbon efficiency of solar photovoltaics manufactured in Yixing and elsewhere.

The aim of the present work is to advance a theoretical framework for the comparative study of dispossession by explaining how the political economy of land dispossession has transformed from state-led developmentalism to neoliberalism in India. The dissertation compares the archetypical forms of dispossession in each period and argues that they constitute different regimes of dispossession. A regime of dispossession is an institutionalized way of expropriating landed assets from their current owners or users. Each regime of dispossession is distinguished by: 1) a set of purposes for which a state is willing to dispossess land and 2) a way of producing compliance to that dispossession. Under different regimes, dispossession facilitates different kinds of accumulation with variable developmental consequences. These consequences crucially effect the long-term political stability of a regime of dispossession.Between independence in 1947 and economic liberalization in the early 1990s, India operated under a developmentalist regime of dispossession. Under this regime, the Indian state dispossessed land for state-led industrial and infrastructural projects, ensuring compliance through coercion and powerful ideological appeals to national development. This dispossession facilitated productive agrarian and industrial accumulation that disproportionately benefited the industrial bourgeoisie, big farmers, and the public sector elite, but also delivered some benefits to other classes. This development was, however, based on the impoverishment of tens of millions of people that it dispossessed. For many decades, this regime was able to convince a wide public that such dispossession constituted a necessary sacrifice for "the nation." Social movements in the 1970s and 1980s challenged this view, but they could not substantially impede dispossession before the developmentalist regime gave way to economic liberalization. Economic liberalization in the early 1990s generated a transition to a new neoliberal regime of dispossession in which state governments restructured themselves as land brokers for private capital. No longer just dispossessing land for state-led industrial and infrastructural projects, states turned to dispossessing peasants for private real estate. Special Economic Zones (SEZs) are the archetype of this regime. Based on 19 months of ethnographic research on one of the first large SEZs in North India, this dissertation illustrates the character and consequences of this neoliberal regime of dispossession. First, it argues that dispossessing land for SEZs lacks legitimacy, fuelling "land wars"; however, states may be able to generate material compliance among some farmers by absorbing them into real estate markets. Second, it argues that dispossessing land for SEZs facilitates real estate and knowledge-intensive accumulation that benefits a narrow set of class interests, while disaccumulating agrarian assets and marginalizing rural labor. Third, it argues that the major economic effect of this accumulation is real estate speculation, which generates unequal and involutionary agrarian change that leaves the majority of the dispossessed impoverished. The result is "dispossession without development." The dissertation concludes that India's neoliberal regime of dispossession will remain politically tenuous. It ends by outlining a comparative research program on the sociology of dispossession.By integrating land dispossession into theories of capitalist development, the theory of regimes of dispossession fills an absence in development sociology and reconstructs Marxist theories of "primitive accumulation," enhancing our understanding of states, economic development, agrarian change, and rural politics.

Both the housing bubble and the subprime meltdown ratcheted up levels of class and racial inequality to levels not seen since the 1930s. In the nation's increasingly diverse suburbs, this has meant both new forms of interaction and new forms of division. This dissertation looks at these dynamics through the eyes of an often-ignored subject--youth. Through an ethnographic examination of young people's transition to high school during the subprime crisis, I explore the ways in which a new economic paradigm--one based largely on dispossession--is transforming the educational and cultural lives of both very wealthy and very poor suburban youth. I introduce the framework of "education by dispossession" as a means of linking the current economic paradigm to the ongoing transformation of the educational institutions, ideologies, spaces and practices these youth encounter.

This dissertation aims to provide a history of dispossession in China from 1927 to 1979. It discusses the ways the property politics in the Nationalist and Socialist regimes have shaped the urban development of a Chinese city, Nanjing. Drawing upon the insights of Michel Foucault's governmentality studies, this dissertation tries to make sense of the shifts in relations between knowledge, power, and subjectivity in China's management of urban property, urban spaces, and urban population.The studied period from 1927 to 1979 marked the transition from sovereignty to governmentality in China. In western liberal societies, this transition was characterized by the limitation of state power and the increasing protection of individual rights. Curiously, in China, the growth and expansion of governmentality was accompanied by massive property dispossession. To examine the co-evolution of modern statehood and modern subjectivity in China, I have identified four dispossession practices adopted or invented during the studied period: eminent domain, slum clearance, socialist transformation, and communization. By studying these practices and the logic that informs them, this dissertation seeks to understand the significant shifts in how logic and objects of government are understood and acted upon, due to changing political rationality in modern China. It argues that the Chinese governmentality and the psychological, biological, sociological, and economic processes that constitute them are property-related. The control of real property has been considered by both the Nationalist Government and the Socialist Government as prerequisite to the production of governable subjects and governable spaces. This dissertation analyzes this property-based governmentality in terms of: (1) how reality of modern China was translated into governmental thoughts leading to the state monopoly of real property, and how these thoughts were rationalized; (2) how thoughts about governing real property were turned into practices, and what technologies and techniques of governments were adopted or invented to achieve these goals; (3) how the government of real property had at the same time rendered the Chinese population governable; and (4) the production of new governable spaces out of dispossession.This dissertation concludes that the Nationalist and the Socialist regimes have different political rationalities, which produced two kinds of property politics respectively: "biopolitics" and "biographic politics." The first, "biopolitics," concerns the politicization of biological life. Under "biopolitics," the objective for property-government is to produce a sanitary urban environment so as to maintain the biological welfare of the population. The second one, "biographic politics," concerns the socio-political biography of individuals. Under "biographic politics," the objective for property-government is to remove property privileges from the people with particular biographies in the perspective of the state. Corresponding to this shift, city planning and property redistribution were employed in the two political regimes, respectively, as the main technologies of government to manage urban property, urban spaces, and the urban population.

Abstract: The main objective of my dissertation is to analyze and compare the socio-ecological implications of the adoption of genetically modified (GM) seeds and alternative agroecological farming methods for farming communities in Alberta, Canada and Andhra Pradesh, India – localities situated in contrasting geopolitical, socio-cultural, and structural-institutional contexts in the global economy. For this research, the adoption of GM canola in Alberta and GM cotton in Andhra Pradesh are used as comparative case studies to explore the qualitative impact of agricultural biotechnology on farming communities. Many studies have examined the potential impact of GM crops, but few have looked beyond economic cost-benefit analysis. In this dissertation, I examine social and cultural aspects of farmer decision-making in the adoption of the new seed technology, farmer receptivity to new cropping methods, knowledge translation between laboratory and farmer, and the impact of global knowledge-based technology on local knowledge systems, socio-cultural practices, the nature-society relationship, and gender relations. I use a global ethnography methodology and draw on a series of field interviews with farmers to provide sociological insight into how global processes of the “Gene Revolution” impact different farming communities in different localities in the world-economy. In this dissertation I argue that the debate about the new agricultural technologies (e.g. GM seeds), the environment and agrarian crises should not be narrowed to the question of new technologies per se. Rather it should be understood from an agrarian political ecology perspective articulating political economy (neoliberal governance at global, national and provincial levels, and the processes of dispossession of primary agricultural producers from their means and conditions of production), socio-cultural systems (the construction of hegemonic discourse about genetically modified organisms, agricultural deskilling, gender relations), and ecosystems (a process of mastering nature, monoculturization, environmental risks, metabolic rift) in the context of neoliberal globalization. My fieldwork study of the “Gene Revolution” provides closer, more fine-grained research and analysis of its impacts with sensitivity to local class and status, gender and cultural issues, and the ways in which farmers’ technology adoption decisions can dramatically alter overall quality of life, local knowledge systems, community development, the sustainability of agriculture and the ecosystem itself.

In its attempts to craft Istanbul as a "global city" and attract international business, the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality --which is presently controlled by the Islamic Justice and Development Party (JDP)--is spearheading an ambitious campaign of "urban transformation." The two main pillars of urban transformation are the clearance of squatter settlements on the outskirts of the city for re-development and the enforced gentrification of the inner-city slums. While these renewal projects are carried out in the name of promoting planned urbanization, upgrading the built environment and improving the living conditions of the poor, what they effectively achieve is the expulsion of the urban poor from the city center towards the urban periphery thereby exacerbating spatial inequities. This thesis discusses the emergence of competitive governance policies and the particular speculative urban redevelopment schemes that they underpin and how poor people contest displacement and dispossession through urban renewal. I focus on two neighborhoods: Basibuyuk, a site of squatter redevelopment project located on the Asian side of Istanbul, and the historic neighborhood of Sulukule - home to one of the oldest sedentary Roma communities in the world - which has been demolished as part of the local municipality's renewal project. I found that in both neighborhoods, residents' perceptions of and their abilities to withstand or avert urban renewal projects depend most notably on tenure relations, employment status, existence of networks of solidarity, the level of participation and trust in the neighborhood association, and on the availability of exploitable personal or community connections with the ruling JDP.

Utilizing aspects of social, cultural, political, military and environmental history, this thesis details the cycles of possession and dispossession of the lands of Seneca County, New York. It explores both the changes in the people who claimed the land, and the changes in the natural landscape. Seneca County, a region forged in the fires of war, continues to be a region influenced by the relics and echoes of military and political conflict. Since the closing of the Seneca Army Depot at the end of the Cold War, the current residents of Seneca County have engaged in a fierce debate over the future of the former Depot lands. Whoever wrests ownership of this landscape will determine its future use and influence how its past will be celebrated and remembered.