Echoes of Empire: Property, Mineral, and Technosphere of the Settler Dominion

Harvard GSD

Canada’s push to supply critical minerals for the global energy transition is often framed as a break from its past. This seminar argues otherwise. Returning to the 1924 British Empire Exhibition at Wembley, where Canada was presented as a land of inexhaustible resources, the course traces the ways in which the settler Dominion’s logics persist in today’s extraction frontiers. Operating on the understanding that resource grounds, infrastructure, waste, and atmosphere comprise a “thickened…