Across distant shores? : bridging housing justice and decolonization on Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ territories
department or school: Arts, Faculty of
department or school: Geography, Department of
data provider: DSpace
degree campus: UBCV
creator: Barr, Caolan
issued: 2025-01-09T21:25:49Z
issued: 2024
related degree: Doctor of Philosophy - PhD
degree grantor: University of British Columbia
description: Building on established frameworks of housing justice, urban studies, legal geography, conservation and environmental studies, and settler colonial and Indigenous studies, this work argues that to properly understand housing injustice and the increased prevalence of urban encampments, settler colonialism as a set of ongoing power relations needs to be centered within housing justice scholarship and organizing. Grounded in firsthand accounts of supporting an encampment of unhoused residents at Meegan or ‘Beacon Hill Park’ in Victoria BC, this project reveals the settler colonial discourses and spatio-legal relations underlying efforts to displace unhoused communities from urban parks. Through autoethnography, participant observation and interviews with local community organizers, I examine the connections between settler colonialism and housing injustice through the frame of ‘settler revanchism’. In doing so, I apply a shoreline analytic in which Indigenous sovereignty and housing justice are revealed to be relationally situated struggles connected through everyday resistance to settler colonial power. Across nine chapters, understood as islands connected across seemingly disparate shores, this thesis examines: the development of encampments on Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ territories during the Covid-19 pandemic; the urban history of the City of Victoria focusing on the spatial exclusion of Songhees and Esquimalt people as central to the city’s urban development; the history of Beacon Hill Park, the City’s ‘Crown jewel,’ and the symbolic meanings it carries for settlers in urban space; the ways in which a campaign to evict campers sheltering in Meegan mobilized conservation discourses to retrench settler colonial forms of control; mobilization of the colonial land trust to evade questions of justice for unhoused residents; reflections experiences of organizing through mutual aid at the Meegan encampment relationally with Indigenous sovereignty movements, and; finally, I br…
aggregated CHO: https://circle.library.ubc.ca/rest/handle/2429/90078
note: ACROSS DISTANT SHORES? BRIDGING HOUSING JUSTICE AND DECOLONIZATION ON LƏK̓ʷƏŊƏN AND W̱SÁNEĆ TERRITORIES by Caolan Barr MA., University of Toronto, 2018 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in The Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies (Geography) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) December 2024 © Caolan Barr, 2024 ii The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies for acceptance, a dissertation entitled: Across Distant Shores? Bridging Housing Justice and Decolonization on Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ Territories submitted by Caolan Barr in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Geography. Examining Committee Dr. Sarah Hunt, Associate Professor, School of Environmental Studies, University of Victoria Co- Supervisor Dr. Glen Coulthard, Associate Professor, Political Science and First Nations and Indigenous Studies, University of British Columbia Co-Supervisor Dr. Deborah Cowen, Professor, Department of Geography & Planning, University of Toronto Supervisory Committee Member Dr. Alexandra Flynn, Associate Professor, Peter A. Allard School of Law, University of British Columbia University Examiner Dr. Geraldine Pratt, Professor, Department of Geography, University of British Columbia University Examiner Dr. Jeffery R. Masuda, Associate Professor, School of Public Health and Social Policy, University of Victoria External Examiner iii Abstract Building on established frameworks of housing justice, urban studies, legal geography, conservation and environmental studies, and settler colonial and Indigenous studies, this work argues that to properly understand housing injustice and the increased prevalence of urban encampments, settler colonialism as a set of ongoing power relations needs to be centered within housing justice scholarship and organizing. Grounded in firsthand accounts of …
has type: Thesis/Dissertation
spatial: Downtown-Eastside (Vancouver, B.C.)
date issued: 2025-05
is shown at: 10.14288/1.0447705
language: eng
degree discipline: Geography
provider: Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
publisher: University of British Columbia
rights: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
rights URI: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
scholar level: Graduate
contributor: Hunt, Sarah E.
contributor: Coulthard, Glen Sean, 1974-
type: Text
identifier URI: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/90078