In 2022, we invited junior and senior scholars to share a 3-minute microlecture to reflect on how insurgent and resurgent knowledges shape their methods, politics, and pedagogies, drawing from the communities in which they locate themselves, from their lineages of political practice, and/or their relationships to more-than-human life.
As a teenager in the 1980s, whether on the streets, in the shops, or in the schools of Victoria, British Columbia, I was an easy mark for the often unsolicited question: “Where are you from?”
The question always allowed for a bit of imaginative play on my part, depending on who was doing the asking. I could talk about the exotic lands that they must have been conjuring in their orientalist fantasies gazing at my dark skin, dark eyes, and dark hair. Where else would a browned-skinned girl be from? Certainly not from this hemisphere. Or, once the question was raised, I could insist that I was truly from here, but this defence somehow sadly reaffirmed a structured non-belonging or displacement from being real in this place because the injury of exclusion was already established by its very utterance.
After the Fort Victoria Brick Project came to a conclusion in 1994 – a project that involved lining Government Street in downtown Victoria with the names of pioneers and settlers, my grandfather’s name being placed literally on one of the bricks lining the street (see Figure 1) – it might have seemed that any question of how to take up place or being emplaced had been settled once and for all. However, in practices of naming, settling, and emplacing, questions proliferate.
To continue reading, download Tripping on Pavements here.