“At this moment of reckoning, where histories of colonial violence and their afterlives in economies of extractivism are at the center of struggle, <i>Slow Disturbance</i> offers a powerful and nuanced account of the infrastructural making of the resource frontier. A must-read for those invested in understanding and transforming settler colonial materialities and ecologies.” - Deborah Cowen, author of (The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade) “Rafico Ruiz makes a critical contribution to media studies, settler colonial studies, and studies of infrastructure and the environment. A fantastic book.” - Nicole Starosielski, author of (The Undersea Network) "<i>Slow Disturbance</i> is a valuable and much-needed text that provides thoughtful insights into the ways that resource frontiers are made and enacted through small and slow efforts to sustain settler lives. Ruiz brings a critical eye to the ways that media multiply functions in these colonial projects, opening up space for new approaches to reading colonial archives in relation to their material environments." - Cameron Butler (Public)
Introduction: First Fish, Then Mediation 1
The Way It Was, St. Anthony, 1959 28
1. The Plant 45
Slow Disturbance, "5 Canada" 78
2. Credit and Common Sense 79
The Way It Was, St. Anthony, 2011 111
3. Meta Incognita 120
Slow Disturbance, "Channel 12" 150
4. The Promise of Extraction 153
Slow Disturbance, "Samsung, High Speed Mechanism" 174
The Way It Was, St. Anthony, 1997 176
Notes 181
Bibliography 203
Index 217