Feeling the Plan

Michaela Shirley’s presentation introduces a dissertation-in-progress that reconceptualizes education as a central instrument of regional planning in Diné Bikeyah. Utilizing Diné Critical Studies (CDS), Indigenous planning, community development, and Critical Indigenous Studies, the project investigates how schools have historically operated not only as sites for modernizing Indian reservations but also as ongoing systemic structures of settler colonialism dictating land relations, community and economic development, political economy, governance, and Diné futurity.

Her research conceptualizes lived experience, memory, and affect as forms of political knowledge by examining three pivotal moments in Navajo education planning: George I. Sánchez’s 1948 study, the 1960s Head Start program, and the 2005 Diné Education Sovereignty Act. Through this analysis, the study explores how US federal policy, planning, and liberal reforms have shaped the necropolitical living conditions on the Diné reservation.

Shirley’s project theorizes former boarding school brownfield sites as “archives of feeling,” which are spaces where environmental harm, educational violence, memory, and resurgence intersect. These sites demonstrate both the enduring impacts of settler colonial planning and the persistence of Diné practices of refusal and survival. Ultimately, she aspires her project to position felt theory as a Diné planning praxis grounded in Indigenous planning principles of PlaceKnowing and the 8th generation.