Kimberly Skye Richards is a settler scholar whose writing, teaching, activism, and artistic work engages performance as a vehicle for resisting extractivism and inspiring a just energy transition. She recently co-edited an issue of Canadian Theatre Review on “Extractivism and Performance” (April 2020). She has also published in TDR: The Drama Review, Theatre Journal, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Sustainable Tools for Precarious Times, and An Ecotopian Lexicon: Loanwords to Live With.

Kim is currently developing an open-access video archive of arts-activist strategies to promote a just energy transition. She is also a member of the Mission Circle of SCALE (Sectoral Climate Arts Leadership for the Emergency)-a “network of networks” of artists and organisations working at the intersection of culture and climate in Canada with the mandate to foster a coordinated, artful and impactful response to the climate emergency from Canada’s arts and culture sector.

• Cultural Studies
• Environment
• WRDS (Writing Studies)

WRDS 150A: Settler-coloniality

Settler colonialism is a distinct form of colonialism that functions through the elimination of Indigenous populations via an invasive settler society that, over time, develops a distinctive identity and sovereignty. Settler colonial studies has emerged as a distinct field of historically-oriented and theoretically-rich scholarly research. This course will engage key texts and concepts in settler colonial studies and relate them to contemporary conflicts and injustices in the territory called Canada, including the development of infrastructure for resource extraction, Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, and the discourse of reconciliation. We will consider how Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars working in disciplines such as history, cultural legal studies, genocide studies, Indigenous studies, gender studies, performance studies, anthropology, geography, and education variously research and write about the ongoing socio-cultural, legal, political, and environmental issues that arise from the invasion and settlement of native lands. At the same time, we will reflect upon our own entanglements in the systems of coloniality in writing, research, and our daily lives, especially as we learn and gather on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded Musqueam territory at UBC.

WRDS 150B: Oil Cultures

Oil is a fulcrum around which many of today’s most pressing social, economic, and political issues can be analyzed and understood. In the twenty-first century, we are finally beginning to realize the degree to which oil has transformed modern life while entangling us in unsustainable colonial systems of extraction and dispossession. The increasing recognition of oil’s central role in modernity is met with the awareness that over the next decade we need to transition to new energy sources and new ways of living that enable us to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions and keep global warming to a maximum of 1.5C, beyond which even half a degree will significantly worsen the risks of droughts, floods, extreme heat, and poverty for hundreds of millions of people. Extracting ourselves from our dependence on oil amounts to a social transformation of an unprecedented scale and scope; it entails not only to change the kinds of energy we use and depend on, but also a transformation in values. In this course we will consider some of the social and political challenges of the energy transition we face, and the accompanying cultural transformation.