Rafico Ruiz, Slow Disturbance: Infrastructural Mediation on the Settler Colonial Resource Frontier (Duke 2020)

 You should read this book, right now. Alright, I am biased, as the book is based on a dissertation I co-supervised, but if you are interested in infrastructure, media, mediation, environments, materials, settler-colonialism and its lifeworlds, resource politics, siting and scale-making, extractive economies, or Newfoundland and Labrador, you would do well to spend a few quiet hours in a good chair and let this one disturb you slowly. Same if you just like books with good pictures, as the volume is carried by a combination of archival images and Ruiz’s own remarkable in situ photographs, here deployed not as illustrations, but as method. There are historical, historiographical, conceptual and analytical riches on every page of this book. One comes away from it with an enriched, grounded understanding of how resource frontiers are formed, entrenched and extended through material, infrastructural, institutional and aesthetic mediation. Or, as Ruiz puts it, “First fish, then mediation.” Slow Disturbance resets the terms of what we do and how we should do it. Very inspiring. - DB