About

Bruce Braun is a professor in the Department of Geography, Environment & Society at the University of Minnesota. His research focuses on infrastructure, nature-as-infrastructure, and the dismantling of infrastructure, as well as geosocial formations, geontologies, extraction, and extractive capital. Braun's work critically examines green urbanism and urban sustainability, including urban resilience as a mode of government and design activism. His interests also encompass the intersections of philosophy and geography, particularly humanism and posthumanism, as well as new materialisms. Braun's ecopolitics research addresses environmental social movements, environmentalism and difference, settler colonialism, and environmental justice. He holds a PhD in Geography from the University of British Columbia and is an affiliate faculty member in American Studies. His scholarly contributions include numerous publications on political ecology, social nature, and socio-ecological transformation, and he has received awards such as the McKnight Land-Grant Professorship.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Geography
• Environmental ethics
• Political science
• Epistemology

Selected publications

• Aporias of decolonial solidarity

  Environment and Planning D Society and Space · 2026-02-10

  article

  As environmental movements increasingly embrace calls to decolonize relationships to lands and waters in solidarity with Indigenous nations, such proclamations do not make settler entanglements in the colonial present any less tricky. Drawing on interviews with forest defenders from the Ada’itsx/Fairy Creek logging blockades of 2020-21, we identify several ‘moves to innocence’ that activists employed in their efforts to reconcile their stated commitment to decolonization with the uncomfortable fact that their presence was unwelcomed by leaders of the Pacheedaht nation. Where Indigenous communities are divided over controversial issues such as resource extraction, standing in solidarity always means standing with some from that community but not others. This requires the settler ally to decide which forms of Indigenous self-determination they support – a decision which can aggravate divisions while also undermining the principle of self-determination itself. We argue that in settler colonial contexts, settler-Indigenous solidarity takes the form of an aporia – a species of contradiction in which no course of action remains uncompromised, yet some action must be taken. Rather than seeking the refuge of an unimplicated position, we argue that navigating the aporia demands taking responsibility for the ethically/politically fraught decisions that the settler ally cannot not make.

  PublisherDOI

• A Resonant Ecology

  The AAG Review of Books · 2025-09-02

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  PublisherDOI

• Between Now and Future Sovereignty: Indigenous Forestry in the Conjuncture

  Antipode · 2024-11-25 · 7 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract The participation of Indigenous nations in the industrial logging of their own territories has received scant attention in academic literature despite the challenges it poses for decolonial critiques of extractive industries and efforts of non‐Indigenous land defenders to build solidarity with Indigenous nations. Taking as a point of departure recent struggles over the logging of old forests on Vancouver Island, in the settler province of British Columbia, and drawing on the political economic history of the island's Nuu‐chah‐nulth peoples, we employ a conjunctural analysis to argue that Indigenous forestry can be understood as the articulation of Indigenous practices of self‐determination (in a context heavily constrained by the colonial past and present) with a set of structural fixes for an industry in crisis. We argue that understanding the present moment of Indigenous forestry as a conjuncture affords an analysis of the tricky conditions that Indigenous communities must imperfectly and strategically navigate to adapt their livelihoods and exercise self‐determination in the colonial present while maintaining possibilities for a decolonised future. It also points to a series of contractions at work in Indigenous forestry which could become disarticulated and rearticulated, potentially opening up wider possibilities for a decolonial future in “BC forests”.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• On the Dark Side of the Boom: Narratives of Social Crisis and Liberal Arts of Governance

  Durham Research Online (Durham University) · 2023-02-24

  articleSenior author
  Publisher

• More‐Than‐Human and Deeply Human Perspectives on COVID‐19

  Antipode · 2021-03-30 · 53 citations

  articleOpen access

  This multi-authored contribution explores what the COVID-19 pandemic demands of critical inquiry with a focus on the more-than-human. We show how COVID-19 is a complex series of multispecies encounters shaped by humans, non-human animals, and of course viruses. Central to these encounters is a politics of difference in which certain human lives are protected and helped to flourish while others, both human and animal, are forgotten if not sacrificed. Such difference encompasses practices of racialisation and racism, healthcare austerity, the circulation of capital, border-making, intervention into non-human nature, wildlife trade bans, anthropocentrism, and the exploitation of animal test subjects. The contributions highlight how COVID-19 provides a needed opportunity to unite new materialist and anti-racist, anti-colonial scholarship as well as reimagine more radically sustainable multispecies futures. This requires embracing anti-colonial humility, confronting debts owed to lab animal frontline workers, and rethinking economic systems that helped unleash COVID-19 and ensured it became a disaster.

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• Eight. Oystertecture

  2020-09-15

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Salute to Reviewers 2017–2018/ Hommage aux évaluateurs de 2017–2018

  Canadian Geographies / Géographies canadiennes · 2019-03-01

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Fracking

  2019-03-01 · 2 citations

  otherOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Fracking, it turns out, is much more than a new oilfield technology, and much more than a local issue, for it stitches together the earth and the sky, the local and the global, the geological and the political, and the past and future. Fracking allows for many stories. This chapter focuses on three: fracking as a spatial and geophysical manifestation of "fossil capital" that may give the lie to the idea that "cheap nature" is near its end; fracking as a geo-technical assemblage that challenges how people write political economy and what they include in its accounts; and fracking as a site in which geological and political pasts and futures are produced and contested, including the violent histories and contested futures of settler colonialism. Fracking is thus driven by the demand for ever more energy by globalising capital, part of its "inner logic".

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Oystertecture

  2019-01-01 · 71 citations

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Destituent power and common use: reading Agamben in the Anthropocene

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2018-07-24 · 48 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Western political philosophy has focused much of its attention on the concept of “constituent” power, understood as a revolutionary power that both installs and preserves a new order. This chapter explores and evaluates an alternative to constituent power, drawing on the work of Giorgio Agamben to imagine a “destituent” power that seeks not to knock down an existing order only to institute a new one, but instead to profane it so as to return it to “common” or “new” use. If the “work” of government is to transform reality in accordance with its telos, and to present that reality as the only possible reality, then, we argue, destituent power is that power which deactivates the governmental machine, depriving it of its metaphysical foundations and enabling an active and experimental elaboration of other possible worlds. We conclude by exploring the strengths and limits of the concept in the context of the Anthropocene, understood as a moment in which “being” is again a question, albeit one that surpasses and exceeds the sovereign figure of “man”.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Noel Castree

  7 shared

• Sarah Whatmore

  4 shared

• Stephanie Wakefield

  Florida Atlantic University

  3 shared

• Sarah Hunt

  University of Victoria

  2 shared

• Rosemary‐Claire Collard

  Simon Fraser University

  2 shared

• Geraldine Pratt

  University of British Columbia

  2 shared

• Silvano De la Llata

  Concordia University

  1 shared

• Deborah Cowen

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• McKnight Land-Grant Professorship (2001)