Kieran Tranter

Unsettling Colonial Automobilities explores the vehicle's role in imposing colonialism on Indigenous people and proposes an Indigenous automobility that reclaims sovereignty over place and centricity. Based on extensive fieldwork within First Nations communities, accounts from Indigenous scholars and activists in Australia, New Zealand/Aotearoa, Canada and the United States, and cinematic/literary representations, this contribution challenges unrestricted mobility in modernity and highlights the vehicle's impact on Indigenous communities. Chapters examine how Indigenous people are criminalized for non-compliance with vehicle regulations, explores the vehicle as a tool of racial violence, and discusses how Indigenous communities utilize vehicles for protection, cultural expression, and reconnection with their land. By demonstrating the vehicle's involvement in colonial violence and its potential for empowering Indigenous cultures, Unsettling Colonial Automobilities acknowledges the significance of human movement, migration, and boundary-transcendence in modern life while acknowledging the dark history associated with these phenomena.

Through detailed readings of popular science fiction, including the novels of Frank Herbert and Octavia E. Butler and television's Battlestar Galactica and Doctor Who, this is the first sustained examination of legality in science fiction. Kieran Tranter includes substantive worked examples of the law and legal concepts projected by these science fiction texts, such as Australian car culture, legal responses to cloning and the relationship between legal theory and science fiction. By examining science fiction as the culture of our total technological world, it journeys with the partially-consumed human into the belly of the machine. What it finds is unexpected. Rather than a cold uniformity of exchangeable productive units, there is warmth, diversity and 'life' for the nodes in the networks. Through its science fiction focus it argues that this life generates a very different law of responsibility that can guide living well in technical legality.

Through detailed readings of popular science fiction, including the novels of Frank Herbert and Octavia E. Butler and television's Battlestar Galactica and Doctor Who, this is the first sustained examination of legality in science fiction. Kieran Tranter includes substantive worked examples of the law and legal concepts projected by these science fiction texts, such as Australian car culture, legal responses to cloning and the relationship between legal theory and science fiction. By examining science fiction as the culture of our total technological world, it journeys with the partially-consumed human into the belly of the machine. What it finds is unexpected. Rather than a cold uniformity of exchangeable productive units, there is warmth, diversity and 'life' for the nodes in the networks. Through its science fiction focus it argues that this life generates a very different law of responsibility that can guide living well in technical legality.