Free UNBC anthropology lecture to focus on oil sands and healing

UNBC’s Anthropology in Our Backyard Speaker Series is back and now online so everyone with internet access can tune into the free lecture.

The first focus of the free series is oil sands reclamation.

Reclaimed land is meant to resemble a naturally-occurring boreal forest, but, according to a UNBC release, reclamation has been criticized for ‘desertifying’ a landscape that, before extraction, consisted largely of muskeg (peatlands).

Dr. Tara Joly, an assistant professor at UNBC’s Anthropology Department, will discuss the social and cultural context for the creation of these reclaimed landscapes titled, Growing [With] Muskeg: Oil Sands Reclamation and Healing.

“Considering much of Canada’s subarctic is impacted by extractive industries and related marks of settler colonialism, I’m interested in how different people respond to and consider ways in which people can live with the damage,” explains Dr. Joly.

“Can we attempt to heal disturbed landscapes, and how are different ways of knowing involved in the process? In reclamation discourse and practice, tensions often erupt between settler-colonial and Indigenous perspectives on land use and value.”

The Anthropology in Our Backyards series explores themes of humanity, local and global questioning who we are as cultural and social beings.

Dr. Joly’s online lecture is open to everyone and is scheduled for Thursday (Nov. 26) from 1 to 2:30 p.m.

You can register for it online.