Laurel Mei Turbin
Laurel Mei Turbin is a doctoral candidate in Geography earning a certificate in American Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. For her dissertation research, she is gathering community narratives of militarization in Wai’anae, a rural and heavily militarized area of Hawai’i. Her work examines the intersections of state-sanctioned racial violence, settler colonialism, and environmental racism through developing an ethnography of Indigenous cosmologies and other placemaking discourses and practices. Prior to her studies at the Graduate Center, she earned her Masters in Public Health at Columbia University, and has worked with New York City community organizations including CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities and WE ACT for Environmental Justice.
Collected Work
“Carceral Conservationism: Contested Landscapes and Technologies of Dispossession at Ka‘ena Point, Hawai‘i”
This essay analytically links two fences in Hawai‘i into a genealogy of military occupation. The two fences are not linked spatially, and they differ: the US military encloses Mākua for war preparation, while the State of Hawai‘i constructed the fence at Ka‘ena for a wildlife reserve, producing a space amenable to tourism. Nevertheless, both fences interrupt, manage, and control land-based relationships to reconsolidate and legitimize state authority in the face of powerful grassroots claims to land. Carceral conservationism describes the territorial compromise between grassroots efforts for environmental self-determination and state imperatives to control land and natural resources.