Joseph Weiss

Joseph Weiss is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Wesleyan University. His work explores the intersections between time, ecology, and Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination. Dr. Weiss has been conducting fieldwork with the Haida community of Old Massett since 2010, where he has also worked as a full-time volunteer teaching assistant and occasional school play director. His first book, Shaping the Future on Haida Gwaii: Life Beyond Settler Colonialism (University of British Columbia Press, 2018) is based on this fieldwork, exploring how the Indigenous Haida Nation in Western Canada addresses political and social change through a series of different future-oriented cultural strategies. Dr. Weiss’s current research projects include an oral historical examination of the relationships between the Haida community and the military personnel of Canadian Forces Station Masset, a naval radio base that was established and operated on Haida territory for the latter half of the twentieh century, and a new project that hopes to ethnographically explore the definition of Indigeneity and its relationship to ecological imaginaries at the United Nations. He also maintains abiding interests in commissions of inquiry, the production of political legitimacy, and research ethics in the social sciences. His research has been funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the American Philosophical Society, the Canadian Museum of History, and the University of Chicago.

Posts by This Author

The Erotics of Destruction and the End of the Anthropocene

Visual and New Media Review

The Erotics of Destruction and the End of the Anthropocene

In Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, feminist philosopher of science Donna Haraway (2016) attempts to imagine an alternative to what she ... More