Oral Presentation Institute of Australian Geographers & The New Zealand Geographical Society Conference 2014

Preparing for the ‘age of unsettlement’: seasteading, tiny houses, and the ‘freemen on the land’ (14715)

Lorenzo Veracini

Part of a wider project dedicated to the ‘settler colonial present’, that is, to the ways in which current global practices are informed by settler colonial imaginings, this paper briefly outlines three contemporary movements that advocate pre-emptive displacement as a solution to growing social tension. Three politically marginal and ostensibly disconnected movements are appraised together for the ways in which they exemplify a settler colonial ‘common sense’, a sensitivity that is generally taken for granted and goes unquestioned, and because they are premised on the perception of impending upheaval: what Tony Fry has called the coming ‘Age of Unsettlement’.