States of Emergency/Emergence: Learning from Mauna Kea – A Call for Conversation


Recent events at Mauna Kea, Hawaii reveal that while state authorities enact top-down executive decisions to impose settler law over populations through State of Emergency declarations, nations, practices and people are rising. Hierarchical techniques of the state reinforce colonial power. In our current climate, emergency decisions abound, from policing a border wall, to removing “protestors” from Mauna Kea to creeping pressures to declare climate emergencies. Responding to these pressures, we are seeking to curate and cultivate a conversation in a mini-forum on the Abolition blog about the affective, geopolitical, biopolitical, spatial and temporal dimensions of State of Emergency declarations and current theories and enactments of emergence. In this dialogue/mini-forum, we are calling potential contributors (i.e. writers, artists, poets, storytellers) to incite a conversation and to imagine these relations otherwise. Specifically, we encourage contributing authors to reflect on apparent tensions and relationships between states of emergency and embodied practices, narratives and stories of emergence with a focus on aloha ʻāina futures stemming from radical action at Mauna Kea. 

Please read the essays in the series so far here.

Submissions of 750-1,000 words should be sent to the co-editors of this blog series:

Uahikea Maile <[email protected]> and Sarah Wiebe <[email protected]>

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