Global Studies

In a course on-campus, I presented a project about the ways in which spatiality is designed to uglify behavior and/or bodyminds. In the course we studied “ugly laws,” which is a term that has “become the primary way to refer to [...] laws, which targeted the overlapping categories of the poor, the homeless, vagrants, and those with visible disabilities” (Schweik & Wilson 2015).

This case study provides a specific overview of the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe’s lawsuit against the chemical production giant Monsanto (now Bayer). The Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe is located in Akwesasne at the crossroads between the borders of the settler provinces of Ontario and Quebec and the settler state of New York. They have endured the effects of Monsanto’s production of Polychlorinated Biphenyls and the fact that they became a pollutant in the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribes' main water source, the St. Lawrence River Watershed.