Dr. Gabi Kirk talks with David Abramson about our beloved Arboretum in Davis, CA and its militarism in the past.
The Militarized Campus Arboretum is a research and teaching project that explores the histories of everyday militarism “hidden in plain sight” at the University of California, Davis. Our project aims to teach UC Davis campus affiliates, Davis community members, and visitors about the multiple militarized legacies of UC Davis and the land grant university as a whole. The research project was started to explore the use of UC Davis campus facilities as a training school for the Western Signal Corps School during World War II (1943-1944), but has expanded to analyze how US imperialism overseas is intimately linked to domestic policing and settler colonialism.
Dr. Kirk is a political ecologist interested in how agriculture has been used as a tool of settler-colonial dispossession and of anti-colonial resistance. She is writing a monograph book on this research topic. She has conducted field research in Palestine, focused in the Jenin governorate of the northern Occupied West Bank. She also studies the historical arc of agrarian change and colonial and imperial agricultural science, drawing on archives in California, New York, London, Jerusalem, Ramallah, and more.
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