Catherine Nolin
Catherine Nolin is a Professor of Geography & Chair of the Department of Geography, Earth & Environmental Sciences at the University of Northern British Columbia, Canada. Our Department is part of the new Faculty of Environment. I am also affiliated with the following Graduate Studies programs:
- Natural Resources and Environmental Studies (MA NRES Geography stream & PhD program)
- Interdisciplinary Studies (IDIS)
and
Between July 2020 & July 2022, Catherine served as Chair of the Conference of Latin American Geography (CLAG). CLAG is the premier organization for geographers engaging in research in Latin America and the Caribbean and works to foster research, education, and service related to Latin American geographical studies. Catherine is a long-time insurgent researcher and social justice advocate, including more than 25 years grappling with the afterlives of the Guatemalan genocides. Catherine has worked with Grahame Russell of Rights Action for almost 20 years to organize and facilitate field schools to Guatemala for undergraduate and graduate students. Catherine and Grahame Co-edited the book "Testimonio: Canadian Mining in the Aftermath of Genocides in Guatemala" published by Between the Lines Press in October 2021.
Supervisors: Dr. Audrey Kobayashi and Dr. W. George Lovell
Phone: 2509605875
Address: Geography Program,
University of Northern British Columbia
3333 University Way
Prince George, BC, CANADA V2N 4Z9
- Natural Resources and Environmental Studies (MA NRES Geography stream & PhD program)
- Interdisciplinary Studies (IDIS)
and
Between July 2020 & July 2022, Catherine served as Chair of the Conference of Latin American Geography (CLAG). CLAG is the premier organization for geographers engaging in research in Latin America and the Caribbean and works to foster research, education, and service related to Latin American geographical studies. Catherine is a long-time insurgent researcher and social justice advocate, including more than 25 years grappling with the afterlives of the Guatemalan genocides. Catherine has worked with Grahame Russell of Rights Action for almost 20 years to organize and facilitate field schools to Guatemala for undergraduate and graduate students. Catherine and Grahame Co-edited the book "Testimonio: Canadian Mining in the Aftermath of Genocides in Guatemala" published by Between the Lines Press in October 2021.
Supervisors: Dr. Audrey Kobayashi and Dr. W. George Lovell
Phone: 2509605875
Address: Geography Program,
University of Northern British Columbia
3333 University Way
Prince George, BC, CANADA V2N 4Z9
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Books by Catherine Nolin
Editors Catherine Nolin and Grahame Russell draw on over thirty years of community-based research and direct community support work in Guatemala to expose the ruthless state machinery that benefits the Canadian mining industry—a staggeringly profitable juggernaut of exploitation, sanctioned and supported every step of the way by the Canadian government.
This edited collection calls on Canadians to hold our government and companies fully to account for their role in enabling and profiting from violence in Guatemala. The text stands apart in featuring a series of unflinching testimonios (testimonies) authored by Indigenous community leaders in Guatemala, as well as wide-ranging contributions from investigative journalists, scholars, lawyers, activists, and documentarians on the ground.
Transnational Ruptures: Gender and Forced Migration, by Catherine Nolin, is
the ninth title to appear in the Ashgate series “Gender in a Global/Local World.”
The series takes advantage of critically engaged new feminist and gender studies
scholarship in the turn towards the global. This turn has produced an increased
concern with the (gendered) impacts of globalization and contingent international
processes. All volumes in this interdisciplinary series pose alternative, gendered
questions to mainstream discussion of global processes and local responses.
This volume is no exception. Transnational Ruptures is truly a global/local
project. It contributes to a further round of transnational migration scholarship,
applying a transnational optic to refugee studies in particular (its theoretical
innovation) and to the landscapes of refugees from Guatemala in particular (its
methodological contribution). While the refugees in the study reside primarily in
Canada, comparisons are drawn with regional migrants living in other contexts,
particularly the United States. The comparisons are particularly revealing of how
state policies structure transnational experiences, both in contexts of origin for those who remain behind and in the new locations where immigrants reside. Gender, as well as political violence, are shown to be central organizing principles of the refugee immigrant experience.
In demonstrating the relevance of transnationalism to refugee studies, Nolin
takes us well beyond the temptation to conflate place with community and
community with identity, a not uncommon feature in migration studies. Instead,
with a geographer’s insistence on place making as a social and political process, the author charts a course through the “rupturing” and “suturing” of ties, both physical and material, social and personal, experienced by refugees whose migrations commence from political violence. Forced into exile, refugees are often unable to sustain the kinds of transnational connections to their places of origin that the new transnationalism literature describes for many immigrants. For example, remittances, now considered a definitive feature of many transnational migration flows, are less a feature of the transnational connections for the subjects in Nolin’s study, a finding that directs us back to the harsh realities of racialized labour markets and the persistent “income gap” experienced by new immigrants. Further, through careful attention to the spatialization of immigrants lives, the insight that refugee social spaces are not necessarily geographic, offers significant challenge to the literature on immigrant communities which can over-read geographic proximity as “community”.
With this insight Nolin’s work follows on from Women Migration and Citizenship, edited by Tastsoglou and Dobrowolsky, its predecessor in this series, Transnational Ruptures: Gender and Forced Migration to contribute further detailed examples of the gender differentiated experiences of citizenship, here provided through heart-wrenching accounts of refugee social isolation. Methodologically, Nolin’s multi-scaled, multi-method, multi-sited, qualitative study, provides a model for interdisciplinary transnational studies, not only of refugees, but other immigrant populations as well. The study has significant implications for researchers and policy makers concerned with the problems and challenges confronting refugees and immigrants in an increasingly unequal yet globally connected world.
Pauline Gardiner Barber
Marianne Marchand
Jane Parpart
Papers and Chapters by Catherine Nolin
To witness, listen, and write well about the cries and silences of life in contemporary Río Negro and Pacux is to write about post-genocide realities of struggle and strength. It is to write about pain and social suffering, on one hand, and brutality and structural violence on the other. To carry out this daunting task, Nathan Einbinder opened his mind to critical questions of the deep connections between ‘development’ and violence and grappled with ensuing violent geographies at the scale of the individual to those at the scale of the community, nation, and onto the dominant transnational worlds of the World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, and the American government.
Guatemala’s internal armed conflict. The State labelled them as the “internal
enemy” and guerrilla sympathizers, thereby justifying their mass slaughter.
Agamben’s concept of ‘bare life’ is used to explain how the State legitimized the
massacres of the Maya. Exhumations conducted by the Guatemalan Forensic
Anthropology Foundation (FAFG) within the Cobán CREOMPAZ former
military base are the case study for our argument that the active process of
exhuming is an act of place making and re-dignifies the victims. Landscapes
of fear and terror frame our interpretation of CREOMPAZ’s geographies of
violence.
Key words: mass graves, Guatemala, place making, “bare life”
Keywords: Canada; development; natural resources; Guatemala; indigenous; neoliberalism; mining
2006).
In this paper, we highlight the unique and little understood social and spatial geographies of MOB settlement and integration (or lack of) into rural and remote northern B.C. We explore the highly gendered hidden avenues of immigration and settlement of MOBs in northern B.C., with specific focus on the experiences of women living in the “periphery."
We will provide a brief overview of this marriage industry. We will then review the goal of our recent study, with special attention paid to the study region of northern B.C. We will introduce the field work we conducted in the summer of 2008 and focus on two “transnational ethnographies” (Nolin 2006) of MOBs
living in northern B.C. We conclude with some final discussion points."
enthusiasm for the possibilities of building a dynamic life north of 53° is infectious and reinforces the theme of celebrating diversity and the spaces of inclusion and innovation that shape this region, which barely registers on the Canadian immigrant settlement scene.
Editors Catherine Nolin and Grahame Russell draw on over thirty years of community-based research and direct community support work in Guatemala to expose the ruthless state machinery that benefits the Canadian mining industry—a staggeringly profitable juggernaut of exploitation, sanctioned and supported every step of the way by the Canadian government.
This edited collection calls on Canadians to hold our government and companies fully to account for their role in enabling and profiting from violence in Guatemala. The text stands apart in featuring a series of unflinching testimonios (testimonies) authored by Indigenous community leaders in Guatemala, as well as wide-ranging contributions from investigative journalists, scholars, lawyers, activists, and documentarians on the ground.
Transnational Ruptures: Gender and Forced Migration, by Catherine Nolin, is
the ninth title to appear in the Ashgate series “Gender in a Global/Local World.”
The series takes advantage of critically engaged new feminist and gender studies
scholarship in the turn towards the global. This turn has produced an increased
concern with the (gendered) impacts of globalization and contingent international
processes. All volumes in this interdisciplinary series pose alternative, gendered
questions to mainstream discussion of global processes and local responses.
This volume is no exception. Transnational Ruptures is truly a global/local
project. It contributes to a further round of transnational migration scholarship,
applying a transnational optic to refugee studies in particular (its theoretical
innovation) and to the landscapes of refugees from Guatemala in particular (its
methodological contribution). While the refugees in the study reside primarily in
Canada, comparisons are drawn with regional migrants living in other contexts,
particularly the United States. The comparisons are particularly revealing of how
state policies structure transnational experiences, both in contexts of origin for those who remain behind and in the new locations where immigrants reside. Gender, as well as political violence, are shown to be central organizing principles of the refugee immigrant experience.
In demonstrating the relevance of transnationalism to refugee studies, Nolin
takes us well beyond the temptation to conflate place with community and
community with identity, a not uncommon feature in migration studies. Instead,
with a geographer’s insistence on place making as a social and political process, the author charts a course through the “rupturing” and “suturing” of ties, both physical and material, social and personal, experienced by refugees whose migrations commence from political violence. Forced into exile, refugees are often unable to sustain the kinds of transnational connections to their places of origin that the new transnationalism literature describes for many immigrants. For example, remittances, now considered a definitive feature of many transnational migration flows, are less a feature of the transnational connections for the subjects in Nolin’s study, a finding that directs us back to the harsh realities of racialized labour markets and the persistent “income gap” experienced by new immigrants. Further, through careful attention to the spatialization of immigrants lives, the insight that refugee social spaces are not necessarily geographic, offers significant challenge to the literature on immigrant communities which can over-read geographic proximity as “community”.
With this insight Nolin’s work follows on from Women Migration and Citizenship, edited by Tastsoglou and Dobrowolsky, its predecessor in this series, Transnational Ruptures: Gender and Forced Migration to contribute further detailed examples of the gender differentiated experiences of citizenship, here provided through heart-wrenching accounts of refugee social isolation. Methodologically, Nolin’s multi-scaled, multi-method, multi-sited, qualitative study, provides a model for interdisciplinary transnational studies, not only of refugees, but other immigrant populations as well. The study has significant implications for researchers and policy makers concerned with the problems and challenges confronting refugees and immigrants in an increasingly unequal yet globally connected world.
Pauline Gardiner Barber
Marianne Marchand
Jane Parpart
To witness, listen, and write well about the cries and silences of life in contemporary Río Negro and Pacux is to write about post-genocide realities of struggle and strength. It is to write about pain and social suffering, on one hand, and brutality and structural violence on the other. To carry out this daunting task, Nathan Einbinder opened his mind to critical questions of the deep connections between ‘development’ and violence and grappled with ensuing violent geographies at the scale of the individual to those at the scale of the community, nation, and onto the dominant transnational worlds of the World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, and the American government.
Guatemala’s internal armed conflict. The State labelled them as the “internal
enemy” and guerrilla sympathizers, thereby justifying their mass slaughter.
Agamben’s concept of ‘bare life’ is used to explain how the State legitimized the
massacres of the Maya. Exhumations conducted by the Guatemalan Forensic
Anthropology Foundation (FAFG) within the Cobán CREOMPAZ former
military base are the case study for our argument that the active process of
exhuming is an act of place making and re-dignifies the victims. Landscapes
of fear and terror frame our interpretation of CREOMPAZ’s geographies of
violence.
Key words: mass graves, Guatemala, place making, “bare life”
Keywords: Canada; development; natural resources; Guatemala; indigenous; neoliberalism; mining
2006).
In this paper, we highlight the unique and little understood social and spatial geographies of MOB settlement and integration (or lack of) into rural and remote northern B.C. We explore the highly gendered hidden avenues of immigration and settlement of MOBs in northern B.C., with specific focus on the experiences of women living in the “periphery."
We will provide a brief overview of this marriage industry. We will then review the goal of our recent study, with special attention paid to the study region of northern B.C. We will introduce the field work we conducted in the summer of 2008 and focus on two “transnational ethnographies” (Nolin 2006) of MOBs
living in northern B.C. We conclude with some final discussion points."
enthusiasm for the possibilities of building a dynamic life north of 53° is infectious and reinforces the theme of celebrating diversity and the spaces of inclusion and innovation that shape this region, which barely registers on the Canadian immigrant settlement scene.
The overall goal of this project is to develop a better understanding of the complexity of regionalization in British Columbia (BC) and to develop recommendations and opportunities for community-based solutions to attract and retain immigrants. The following section is a literature review describing the factors underlying immigrant decisions about destination, settlement and leaving rural regions or small towns."
Preliminary research conducted over the summers of 2008 and 2010 employed testimonio to document the forced and violent evictions experienced by the Maya Q’eqchi’ communities of Loté Ocho, Loté Nueve, La Paz, and La Unión between October 2006 to January 2007. The power of the recorded testimonios is demonstrated through our formal human rights violation complaint submitted to the Canadian Government and two lawsuits filed against Canadian companies HudBay Minerals Inc. and HMI Nickel.
Ongoing research will use testimonio to document Maya Q’eqchi’ connections to their ancestral lands, Maya Q’eqchi’ perceptions of mining development, and Maya Q’eqchi’ perceptions of mining as it affects their connections to their ancestral lands.
The FAFG – CREOMPAZ Base exhumation is one example of the shift from despair to hope that the country is experiencing. This excavation represents a chance at uncovering the truth from the Guatemala internal armed conflict (1960-1996) where over 250,000 individuals were killed or disappeared and the role that the Guatemala military played in state terrorism. These graves comprise the disappeared; those whose family members have no knowledge of the fate or whereabouts of their loved ones. Testimonies collected by the FAFG indicate the location of the graves and there are at minimum 335 reported individuals missing from the Cobán area during the internal armed conflict. Currently, a small team of organized archaeologists and excavators are uncovering the truth buried within the former military garrison. Based on fieldwork in May – July 2012, the poster presentation will outline the significance of this excavation and reflections from days spent brushing away the dirt and exhuming the truth in the CREOMPAZ Base.
These contributions will have gone well beyond the nominee’s normal job-related duties and will set an example for all British Columbians in sustainable landscape and/or resource management.
Nominees for this award may be from government, non-government organizations, universities, contract researchers, or other associations.
A recipient of the Community Advancement award will have clearly demonstrated substantial contributions and achievements.