Price draws upon the work of Eve Tuck and Wayne K. Yang, to highlight that by not attending to harm we often engage in moves to innocence. Moves to innocence was a phrase coined by Tuck and Yang to discuss that when we conceptualize decolonization as a buzzword, or a new emerging field terminology, outside of the practical and felt daily harms of colonization, we don’t just create colonization into a metaphor, and it makes individuals more open to adapt ‘moves to innocence.’ Moves to innocence occur when in pursuit to not feel guilty about the violent history of settler colonialism, individuals evoke, often rhetorical, strategies that remove their involvement in systems of settler colonialism.

Moves to Innocence

Price notes that when we theorize about space there has been a focus on attention to and accountability to previous harms without a notice of how harm is ongoing, as highlighted by Wolfe systems like settler colonialism require daily upkeep and thus a daily reassertion of harm. 

University of Wisconsin - Madison

Patrick Wolfe, centers that settler colonialism is not a singular event, rather it is a structure, as settler colonialism didn't just happen when the settler arrived, rather it is reasserted everyday with the occupation of settlers both phyiscally and the foregrounding of settler systems of knowledge.

Settler Colonialism as a Structure and not as Event

Price, M. (2024). Crip Spacetime. Duke University Press.

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