UC Irvine

This dissertation examines U.S. public lands conflict through the lens of place and place-making, analyzing how commitments to specific visions of place guide settler engagements with contentious land management in southern Utah. Drawing on seven years of closely tracking public lands issues and three years of ethnographic fieldwork in and around Kanab, Utah, I argue that two dominant white settler visions of place—one centered on agrarian heritage and one on wilderness—reflect constellations of qualities that are seen to be enduring features of southern Utah. I present specific points within these constellations across my chapters as I examine land and place in several domains. First, I illustrate how everyday place-making permeates community life in Kanab, examining the various threads that Kanab residents weave in their efforts to define what type of place the town and region is. Next, I show how dominant place narratives are used to frame articulations of “correct” land management and claims about who has a legitimate say in public land decisions, arguing that these narratives function as a form of settler memory. Finally, I show how commitments to particular visions of ideal places influence how individuals receive, interpret, and wield data in relation to land decisions, exploring how symbolic resonance with features of place shapes people’s assessments of the quality, validity, and relevance of data. I argue that these various place-making dynamics cultivate ill-will that fuels socio-political polarization, all while sharing similar (though largely unrecognized) settler colonial foundations. Utilizing a lens of place to examine land use conflicts in this setting helps reveal often-obscured desires embedded in settler engagements with public lands issues and provides an explanatory framework to make sense of the seeming contradictions and inconsistencies observed in pro- and anti-protections discourse and action.