ASHTON WESNER, PH.D.
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Figure 12 details both the US Army Corps of Engineers equipment used for removing riverine formations to "improve" channel navigability, as well as the Basaltic cliffs on Washington (for now) shoreline of the Columbia River-- Nch'i-Wána. Willingham, W. "Army Engineers and the Development of Oregon: A History of the Portland District U.S. Army Corps of Engineers." 1980, p13.
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Southern retention wall of the Dalles Dam, from what is (for now) Oregon: looking north across the Union Pacific rail line. Photograph by author: 2016.
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"CARS LINE AREA NEAR CELILO FALLS WHERE INDIANS DIP-NET FOR SALMON, SPECTATORS OBSERVE ACTION FROM ROCKS ABOVE." OHS neg., CN 007466. Photograph by Les Ordeman, Casco County: 1955.
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Metal catwalks over fish entry channels at the Bonneville Fish Hatchery. Photograph by author: 2016.

ROUTING THE SCENIC

​   In Routing the Scenic: settler colonialist sense and environmental culture in the Columbia River Gorge I examine     the historical legacy and quotidian production of U.S. settler colonial violence through scientific practices. 
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The Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area is the largest national scenic area in the United States. Signed into federal law by President Reagan in 1986, the National Scenic Area Act (NSAA) marked a national first in bi-state governance and innovation in scenic preservation. Through the Act, Oregon and Washington formed a commission charged with land use planning and economic development along the Mid-Columbia River: Over 292,000 acres of rural, urban, and forest service land in the throes of recovery from extractive industry decline. Popular globally for its vistas and windsurfing, the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area is lauded as a turning point in “how the west is planned,” remade as an eco-playground through tourist and tech sectors despite decades of reconfiguration to accommodate hydropower and industry. Yet the Scenic Area preserved today is a product of 20th century settler nation-state formation characterized by dam construction, highway extension, and commercial fishing. In my research, I demonstrate how these projects of capital expansion relied on technologies of measurement, valuation, and boundary making that dispossessed and (re)spatialized the homelands and persisting political lives of Columbia River Treaty Tribes.

How can we understand the material and ideological consequences of environmental land use planning that emerges from, and is made possible by, the conditions of U.S. colonial dispossession and biologics that continue to produce housing shortages, barriers to economic self-determination, and violate federal Treaty? Scholars have theorized the historical co-constitution of power and labor through hydroelectric and fishery development in the Columbia River, and the role of Pacific Northwestern landscapes and scenery in shaping contemporary U.S. environmentalisms. However, what has remained unexamined is how scenic preservation—and the corresponding natural sciences and narratives that chart, measure, and demarcate scenery—is imbricated in the political and spatial ordering of Native lands. This project sheds light on historical relationships between the scientific technologies of making a “scenic river” and the (re)production of colonialist claims to land and cultural normalization of dispossession in the Mid-Columbia. I interrogate quotidian cultures of masculinist whiteness, cultures of ecological curation, and interlocking militarisms in Scenic space, with implications for contemporary anti-colonial environmental politics in a time of urgent climate change adaptation and global Indigenous social movements.

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My future research builds on my work in the Mid-Columbia River to investigate toxic sediments and the diverse knowledge and management practices that converge and contest one another around various socioenvironmental harms that sediments produce. I propose that studying sedimentation can disrupt entangled violences and ecological changes that are often illegible or obscured in landscapes shaped by colonial territorialization.  

CV
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COLLABORATIVE  RESEARCH

   in STS, Environmental Justice, & Education
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Two additional projects inform my scholarship and teaching. Both are collaborative. One consists of embedded and iterative ethnography with arachnologists who study spider sex (as a node of animal mating behavior and ecology more broadly). I collaborate with scientists the Elias Lab, here at UC Berkeley, to analyze how their own disciplinary investment in gender dimorphism and biological sex difference is upheld (or upended) by the messy materialities emergent in their study of jumping spider mate-choice. This project investigates the practices, instruments, field experiences, communications, media representations, and political alliances that constitute the very laboratories and scientific communities in and through which knowledge of “queer animals” and “queer ecosystems” is being produced. Together we ask: How do practicing biologists uphold and upend heteropatriarchal understandings of sex, gender, and violence in their quotidian study of non-human animals? How might animal behavior sciences offer openings for feminist analytics of bodily and environmental health and harm? We aim to generate innovative feminist STS methods and a queer ecology research agenda (for academics and social-change agents alike). 

My second ongoing project also foregrounds the intersection of race, gender, and environmental knowledge production. Less bounded, and more multi-sited, this line of my work evaluates community engaged (CE) STEM pedagogies. Together with interdisciplinary collaborators, we situate CE trends within institutional histories of social justice higher-education and develop curriculum for teaching socially-situated sciences.

PUblications

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  • 2020     Kamath, A., and Wesner, A. Animal territoriality, property, and access: a collaborative exchange between animal behavior and the social sciences. Animal Behaviour. 
  • 2019    Wesner, A. Messing Up Mating: Queer Feminist Engagements with Animal Behavior Science. Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, ​48(3), 309-345. 
  • 2019    Wesner, A., Moore, S., Martin, J., Kirk, G., Dev, L., Behrsin, I. (2019). Left Coast Political Ecology: a manifesto, Journal of Political Ecology, 6(1), 529-544.
  • 2018    Wesner, A. Contested Sonic Space: Settler Territoriality and Sonic Visualization at Celilo Falls. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 4(2), 1-34. 
  • 2017    Andrade, K., Cushing, L., and Wesner, A. Science Shops and the U.S. Research University: A Path for Community Engaged Scholarship and Disruption of the Power Dynamics of Knowledge Production, in Mitchell, T., Soria, K. eds. Educating for Citizenship and Social Justice: Practices for Community Engagement at Research Universities, Palgrave MacMillan.
  • 2017    Baur, P., Corbin, C.N.E., Goreki, J., Roberts-Gregory, F., Wesner, A., and anonymous contributors. The Right to Protest Violence, The Berkeley Graduate, 3rd March, http://www.theberkeleygraduate.com/2017/03/03/the-right-to-protest-violence/
  • 2015   Corbin, C.N.E., Douglass-Jaimes, G., Williamson, J., Wesner, A., Higgins, M.,Palomino, J. and contributors Packer, M., and Roberts-Gregory, F. (Re)Thinking the Tenure Process by Embracing Diversity in Scholars and Scholarship, UCSA Graduate Student Policy Journal, (1)1:4-9.
  • 2014    Wesner, A., Pyatt, J., and Corbin, C.N.E. Main Article: The Practical Realities of Giving Back, Journal of Research Practice, 10(2): http://jrp.icaap.org/index.php/jrp/article/view/426/346.
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