Price evokes Tuck and Yang’s idea of incommensurability to point out that, as an example, as we are working to create more accessible and anti-ableist academic spaces we also have to acknowledge and hold in tension that while settler-colonialism sits at the root of why academic spaces are inaccessible, settler-colonialism is also a cornerstone of to modern academy - including the fact that many U.S. universities were established by the Morill Land Grant Act to directly take land away from native nations.

Example of Incommensurability

Regenerative Refusal was proposed by Maile Arvin, an Indigenous Studies Scholar, pulling on the idea of incommensurability and proposing an ethic of incommensurability. Regenerative refusal is a strategy employed by Kanaka Maoli and other Indigenous people that poses, instead of focusing on a return to the past, and instead of centering Indigenous movements on state-sanctioned forms of recognition, focusing on the impacts of settler colonialism within Indigenous communities.

Regenerative Refusal

Eve Tuck and Wayne K. Yang trouble how far this unpacking of the university as a colonial space within projects for access at the university can truly go, because of the concept they coin as incommensurability. Incommensurability highlights that there are portions of anti-oppressive struggles that simply cannot be aligned or allied despite overarching solidarities, and serves as an acknowledgement that decolonization will require a change in the social fabric and order of how we currently operate.

University of Wisconsin - Madison

Foregrounding this harm that is erased threatens not just non-disabled but also settler-colonial and white-supremacist framing of time and space. This is because settler-colonialism, white-supremacy, and ableism are built into the terrain and spaces we exist within and by centreing that violence currently existing, we can't fully unpack that violence without paying attention to the histories of violence and harm that have made our institutions and the role reconciliation and repair need to play in those practices.

Foregrounding Harm, White Supremacy, and Settler-colonialism

Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. 2012. “Decolonization Is Not A Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigenity, Education, and Society 1(1):1-40.

Decolonization Is Not A Metaphor

Settler colonialism is presented as, in contrast to colonialism, a more durable colonial formation since colonialism was often seen by European powers as ultimately temporary until colonized people would be steeped enough in colonial traditions to run their affairs independently. Settler colonialism then differentiates colonial projects that work to both supplant the societal formation that came before them and change the space they are within to their needs. Additionally, unlike colonial projects, settler colonial projects are generally seen as able to create new colonial and settler colonial projects on their own. 

Settler colonialism

For the Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians), palena - or place boundaries - consist of ahupua'a, land subdivisions that traditionally extended from the top of a mountain range to the sea and traditionally include the variety of resources therein. For Kanaka Maoli who observe ahupua'a systems, individuals note which ahupua'a they are from, distances can be measured in the number of ahupua'a you would pass through, and ahupua'a would be used to denote claims to resources. The impositions of miles and mile markers, or towns and citites, were used in the colonization of Hawai'i, thus to truly imagine a decolonized Hawai'i, we cannot just address the harm of indigenous land dispossesion but also note the systems of measurement and colonial understandings of townships that made that possible.

Example - Ahupua'a and Kanaka Understandings of Space

White supremacist and settler colonial approaches to space are inevitably and inherently violent because of their grounding in ownership and control. In settler colonial systems, ownership of land is often centered, so that the ownership of land is the basis on which all over relationships are formed. 

Land Ownership and Control

Incommensurability

Price contends that based on the discussion of harm, and the need to explicitly include harm in our discussions of space that we must also include harm in our discussions of ambient uncertainty, because sigificant harm can occur through ambient uncertainty.

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