Claire Urbanski is a doctoral candidate in the Feminist Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She lives on occupied Lisjan Ohlone lands in the city of Oakland, CA and is a white disabled queer femme writer, scholar, and activist invested in the cultivation of abolitionist and decolonial futures.
Her work studies how settler colonial ideologies of Indigenous dispossession and gendered violence structure and inform relationships between land, property, life, and death.
She is currently completing her dissertation, On Sacred and Stolen Lands: Spiritual Violence and Desecration as United States Settler Colonialism, which examines the role of Indigenous sacred site desecration within the consolidation and reproduction of United States settler colonial empire.
Anzaldúa develops a theory of this borderlands consciousness through the experiential and embodied knowledges of Chicanx (and women of color) feminisms; or what she calls a ‘mestiza consciousness’.