In recent years, scholars of science and technology studies (STS) have increasingly turned their attention to the role of collective imagination in shaping sociotechnical futures. This scholarship leaves open the question of how the collectives involved in bringing these futures to life come into being. Starting with one episode in the ongoing conflict over the construction of Coastal GasLink pipeline on Wet’suwet’en territory in settler-colonial Canada, this discourse analysis draws on scholarship in feminist, anticolonial, and co-productionist STS to study this process of collective formation in relation to sociotechnical futures. It does so by examining how oil and gas workers become enrolled into a sociotechnical imaginary I call Canadian resource techno-nationalism. Comparing media and politicians’ representations of oil and gas workers with White workers’ representations of themselves indicates that they can end up participating in this imaginary regardless of their affinity to it. Examining policy documents and scholarly literature about the inclusion of Indigenous knowledges in impact assessment, as well as political debates and mainstream media coverage about the conflict over the Coastal GasLink pipeline, draws attention to how elites’ active construction and protection of the boundary between knowledge and politics works to enroll Indigenous people into oil and gas jobs and, therefore, into the collective performing Canadian resource techno-nationalism. In both cases, elite actors deploy the resources at their disposal in ways that help funnel oil and gas workers into lives imagined for them, securing the power of the settler state in the process. This dynamic illustrates the importance of disentangling participation in the collective performance of sociotechnical imaginaries from freely given consent. Residents of liberal states can end up performing dominant imaginaries less out of any sense of affinity to them than as a response to the disciplinary power these imaginaries help sustain.

This thesis utilises district court records from the three judicial districts of Hammerdal, Offerdal, and Undersåker to shed light on Saamis’ presence in north-western Jämtland during the seventeenth century. The research question posed is how encounters with the local communities shaped the Saamis’ situation during a period of emerging colonial mores and contributes to the discussion on how encounters with others impacted the situation for the Saami in early modern Sweden. The theoretical framework adopts the concepts of borderlands, concurrences, and settler colonialism to understand the manifold of encounters that shaped the situation for the Saami, acknowledging the possibility that the encounters could be contradictory while also understanding them as shaped within a context of power asymmetries. Contrary to the northern lappmarks, this thesis shows that the Saamis in north-western Jämtland were deprived of representation at the local courts, affecting their influence in local self-governance and administration of justice. Moreover, by not only focusing on Saamis’ encounters with the representatives of the Crown and the Church but also with the non-Saamis who resided in the local communities, this thesis concludes that the Saamis’ situation was shaped by concurring and conflicting encounters, encompassing not only coercion and confrontation but also cooperation and coexistence.

In this work, I trace and reconstruct Taiwan's nation-formation as it is reflected in literary texts produced primarily during the country's two periods of colonial rule, Japanese (1895-1945) and Kuomintang or Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) (1945-1987). One of my central arguments is that the idea of a Taiwanese nation has historically emerged from the interstices of several official and formal nationalisms: Japanese, Chinese, and later Taiwanese. In the following chapters, I argue that the concepts of Taiwan and Taiwanese have been formed and enriched over time in response to the pressures exerted by the state's, colonial or otherwise, pedagogical nation-building discourses. It is through an engagement with these various discourses that the idea of a Taiwanese nation has come to be gradually defined, negotiated, and reinvented by Taiwanese intellectuals of various ethnic backgrounds. I, therefore, focus on authors whose works actively respond to and engage with the state's official nationalism. Following Homi Bhabha's explication in his famous essay "DissemiNation," the basic premise of this dissertation is that the nation, as a narrated space, is not simply shaped by the homogenizing and historicist discourse of nationalism but is realized through people's diverse lived experience. Thus, in reading Taiwanese literature, it is my intention to locate the scraps, patches, and rags of daily life represented in a select number of texts that signal the repeating and reproductive energy of a national life and culture.

This study aims to examine and compare the representations of the colonial era in history textbooks from Uganda and Sweden to broaden the understanding of colonial discourses. Utilizing critical discourse analysis (CDA), it seeks to uncover and emphasize the variations in colonial discourse between the two countries. Findings reveal a nuanced portrayal of colonial history in Ugandan textbooks, characterized by complex and conflicting relationships between colonizers and the colonized, yet heavily patriarchal and overlooking women’s experiences. On the other hand, Swedish textbooks present a stereotypical and dualistic portrayal of colonizers’ cruelty and colonized inferiority. A potential implication from the analysis is that these different representations could impact students’ perspectives and identities, at both individual and societal levels.

This thesis will analyze the Congo from King Leopold II's Free State to the 2nd Congo War. After a thorough investigation of the colonial period, this thesis will analyze the modern period. This thesis contends that the underdevelopment of the Congo, and its continuing warfare and poverty are the consequences of an exploitative colonial history. To be sure, King Leopold II of Belgium created the template for administering the Congo through the installation of concessionary companies that were more interested in harvesting huge profits than creating the conditions for a self-sustaining Congolese economy. Indeed, the policies implemented by King Leopold not only created the framework for the exploitation of the Congo after the cessation of the Free State, and set the stage for Congo's current state of instability of warfare.

As European colonialism was the dominant system of long-distance governance and resource appropriation for centuries, its economic legacies are diverse albeit understated. The existing research looks mainly at the effects of colonialism on a former colony's internal development. This study broadens that scope, looking at which factors are correlated with the presence or absence of a trade agreement with the European Union as well as the number of restrictions to free trade within them. This was carried out through four large-n regressions. The first compared current former- and non-colony trading partners. The second narrowed the scope by comparing only former colonies. The third measured the number of restrictions among all current European Union trade agreements. The fourth measured trade restrictions among former colonies. The results are that various identity, developmental and intuitional variables are correlated with the existence of trade deals and the number of restrictions they contain.

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