Perform and Transform the Settler Colonial City
Digital Infrastructure and Located Expression on Instagram
Abstract
While opposition to the Trans Mountain pipeline extends far beyond British Columbia’s southwest coast, Vancouver provides a specific site to explore the intersections of platform, place, and anti-pipeline sentiment in Instagrammed expression surrounding a controversy embedded in colonial extraction. A city located on Indigenous lands yet shaped by an elite settler imaginary of sustainability, outdoor recreation, and west coast lifestyles, Vancouver-based anti-pipeline resistance sees the uneven geographic intersection of the pipeline with various social, environmental, and climate concerns, including Canada’s failure to acknowledge Indigenous sovereignty on pipeline-affected lands. Through the patterns revealed by digital methods and visual methodologies centered on Instagram’s location tag, this paper reveals how settler colonialism infuses the platformed and grounded components in place-based issue expression – and also how it is resisted, reconfiguring relations both on the land and in the digital realm.
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