In this episode, Gabriel Kozlowski and Tania Li discuss the concept of land and its inscription, colonization by plantation corporations, modes of distribution beyond the “proper job,” and ethnographic approaches to the practice of politics.
Tania Li is a professor of anthropology at the University of Toronto. She's known for her studies concerning land, labor, capitalism, development, politics, and indigeneity with a particular focus on Indonesia. Her work crosses multiple fields like geography, planning, law, and environmental studies, while bringing different actors together from activists to policymakers to make sense of transformations brought about by processes such as land reform, rural class formation, struggles over forests and their conservation, state-organized resettlement initiatives, and problems faced by people who are pushed off their land. Her books include the award-winning Lands End, Capitalist Relations on an Indigenous Frontier, Plantation Life, written with Pujo Semedi, The Will to Improve, Governmentality, Development and the Practices of Politics, the edited volume of Powers of Exclusion, and many more.
Gabriel Kozlowski is a Brazilian architect and curator. He works on questions pertaining to urbanization from the perspective of political ecology. In Urban Nature, Kozlowski talks to prominent thinkers who have been pushing the boundaries of how we understand the relationship between humans and the natural environment.