Aaron Padgett

University of Kentucky, Sociology, Lecturer

University of Kentucky, Appalachian Center, Affiliate Faculty

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Papers by Aaron Padgett

It’s Grandpa’s Land: Settler Property, Heteropatriarchy, and Environmental Disasters

Deviant Hollers: Queering Appalachian Ecologies for a Sustainable Future, 2024

This chapter uses the eminent domain and neoliberal private property regime as a lens for underst... more This chapter uses the eminent domain and neoliberal private property regime as a lens for understanding the connections between settler land relations, heteropatriarchal biopolitics, and the environmental degradation caused by fossil fuel extraction, specifically natural gas transportation. This chapter engages with data from qualitative interviews undertaken in 2018 with West Virginia residents fighting the construction of the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) and the (now cancelled) Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP). Drawing from Indigenous and queer of color critiques, ecological feminisms, and critical geographies, we examine the tensions and contradictions in settler colonial culture that bring to light questions of environmental sustainability. "Grandpa's land" is a term used to describe the white patriarchal settler ideal of land as a unit of inheritance and identity that relies on the historical precondition of Indigenous dispossession. Grandpa's land is produced and reproduced through histories of kinship, biological descent, and individual land ownership that reflect the right to inhabitation but come into conflict with eminent domain and the neoliberal private property regime that prioritizes the market as the arbiter of the best and highest use of resources. Heteronormative structures of the patriarchal land-owing nuclear family function to discipline and diminish people's ability to resist and further upholds settler colonial logics of possessive individualism, sovereignty of the state, and market interests.

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Space Junk Meets the Ocean: De-evolution, Dissolution, and Imperial Ruination

Lo Squaderno, 2025

The social and environmental violence presented by space junk’s collisions on Earth is often imag... more The social and environmental violence presented by space junk’s collisions on Earth is often imagined in territorial and human-centric terms. Most earthbound space junk, however, lands in the ocean and is forgotten. This mirrors an entrenched territorialism in western culture that consistently underestimates the ocean on a planet called Earth. This foreshortened imagination also limits understanding of human interconnectedness with the ocean and each other. With the song “Space Junk” by American new wave band Devo as a starting point, we question one-dimensional discourses of space junk. Colonial-imperial projects attempt to flatten and delimit Earth’s oceanic dissolve, occluding other ways of human and non-human being. Space junk falling in oceans materially represents the violent effects of transoceanic and celestial imperial expansionism. However, the spatial imaginary of terrestrial-centrism reduces planetary space to settler maps, effectively writing off this violence. We examine two aspects of this situation; firstly, that space junk can be seen as a metaphor for the dualistic vision of settler futurity which is bound for progress or ruination in global capitalism, and secondly, that space junk highlights the inseparability of space and ocean on Earth, presenting an opportunity for moving towards a more capacious and transcorporeal understanding of junk ecologies.

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Blue Hegemonies: Confluences of Geocultural Power in the Pacific

Pacific Asia Inquiry, 2025

Hegemonic international relations in and of the Pacific are often cast in geopolitical and econom... more Hegemonic international relations in and of the Pacific are often cast in geopolitical and economic terms in scholarly literature, diplomacy, and media. This article builds from work on "geoculture" to advance the practice of thinking geoculturally about international relations. I argue that thinking geoculturally is a useful heuristic to examine the spatial fix on the Pacific which is exemplified in "blue" environmental discourses. Blue discourses are deployed by global, continental hegemons to demarcate the Pacific into regional formations, hegemonic development paradigms, and ongoing forms of peripheralization. Concurrently, the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF), a multinational diplomatic entity, inverts continentalist dynamics by advancing the counternarrative of the "Blue Pacific Continent" to advocate a pan-Pacific affinity politics which is currently focused on countering the climate crisis. However, recent events within the PIF indicate ongoing hegemonies of Polynesia and Melanesia at the expense of Micronesia. The construction of "blue hegemonies" envelops Native Pacific ways of engaging with seas and oceans into imperialist discourses while blue hegemonic entities imagine and attempt to actualize different Pacific futures. The article follows Diaz (2018; 2019b) in suggesting that contracting notions of oceanic world enlargement into specific locales and depths of place holds potential for more liberatory politics.

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Aaron Padgett

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