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The Pacific has long been appropriated by settler colonial and military powers as a site of experimentation, with detrimental impacts to Indigenous Pacific Islanders and their ancestral lands. Given their perceived isolation and remoteness, islands were targeted for the detonation of nuclear weapons throughout the Cold War era when United States, French, and British governments conducted hundreds of nuclear tests in French Polynesia and Micronesia.

Summerland, in Santa Barbara CA, is often depicted as a coastal town with a beach of white sand and year-round sun where people can bath, exercise, and relax. In this imaginary, the history of this place begins with an oil boom at the turn of the 20th century that has now faded. Since 2011, Summerland’s residents started to push for governmental acknowledgment and remediation of seepage from oil wells that were abandoned decades ago.

A military base in Homestead, Florida—a southern suburb of Miami—is a crucial node in the War on Terror and a command center of the hemispheric War on Drugs. Soldiers from the base deploy to Iraq and Afghanistan, administer the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, and embed as military advisors across Latin America. The base is bordered by a military Superfund site, contaminated with arsenic and benzene, and the largest detention camp for migrant and refugee children in the country, the Homestead Temporary Shelter for Unaccompanied Children.

Carceral histories reveal much about the US security landscape, its commitment to the immobilization of bodies, and its reliance on race, class, and gender to determine national belonging. Drawing from race and ethnic studies, feminist security studies, feminist geographies, queer carceral theory, and queer and trans of color theory, this paper seeks to think queerness and carcerality together to locate the limits of security logics as well as models for coalitional fugitivity.What is California’s spatial relationship to the crafting of criminality?

Dr. Anneeth Hundle is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UCI and Dhan Kaur Sahota (Daan core saahotha) Presidential Chair of Sikh Studies. She is also currently affiliated faculty with the Department of Asian American Studies and Religious Studies at UCI. Dr. Hundle completed her Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Michigan in 2013, focusing on a dissertation project dealing with the aftermath of expulsion and Indian exclusion, as well as renewed racialized migration and settlement of people of South Asian descent to Uganda .

ABSTRACT: This paper examines the migration of North Koreans to South Korea from a critical theoretical perspective. To historicize the division of the Korean peninsula, I examine how the bio-power to “make live” worked in tandem with sovereign power to “take life” in order to construct North Korea and the post-colonies as “death-heterotopias.” To highlight the spatial declension of such necropolitics, I frame the First World as a biopolis, and the “developing” world as a necropolis.

ABSTRACT: Recent Indian Ocean Studies scholarship has tended to focus on the significant historical, cultural, and economic ties that have linked its diverse littoral communities together for centuries (Chaudhuri 1983; Bang 2003; Ho 2006; Sheriff 2010). Yet, much less attention has been dedicated to the dramatic reorganizations of the Indian Ocean world in the past few decades.

ABSTRACT:This project seeks to tell the story of how people leave, find, and make spaces of home for themselves in times of war and its aftermath. In 2014, Abkhazia, a separatist state that succeeded from Georgia after the break-up of the Soviet Union, sponsored repatriation trips for a few hundred Circassian-Syrians. Disenchanted with the lethal conditions in Syria, the country they had grown up and lived in, these Syrian-Circassians decided to “return” to the homeland of their ancestors.